On Life and Death

Why is a life, which can't be saved anyway, worth saving?

      First, no doctor or fireman or collie has ever saved A life. If a "mad" scientist someday learns the trick of indefinitely prolonging young, healthy life, we can still only truly say that he has saved SOME "life" but not A life. In the course of time, an accident will certainly eventually end that life, anyway. And if that accident is a long time coming, the sense of A particular life going on and on will soon enough be lost to the memory. ERB was perfectly right to stipulate that the apparently immortal John Carter couldn't remember far enough back to know himself whether or not he WAS immortal.
        But that is fantasy. No real-world doctor ever saves a life and, even when life is artificially extended for another and another brief gasp, no "mad" scientist has yet invented a trick to indefinitely extend youth along with life.
        Far from it. The extension of life, which is the best (or worst) we can hope for, is, normally, only the extension of old age. Of course, a 20-year-old whose life is artificially prolonged without loss of any important pieces or perspectives is still 20 at that point in time and continues on no more rapidly than before toward old age and death. But most lives prolonged are already old. Normally, the poor, old cancerous, broken, sagging, depleted, hopefully drugged wretch whose life is "saved" is only being forced for the glory (or profit) of the doctor and the doctor's brutal imaginary god to endure more misery. In most cases, the life extension is of a lower quality than the life before it. And, even if it isn't, the only certain chance for salvation from pain and fear has been stolen from the wretch and he has had to endure an additionally painful and fearful and expensive medical ordeal just to go through the approach and fear and pain of death again.
        "Oh! - but...," the self-perceived wizards piously entone, "...it isn't just the suicide's life or the accident victim's life or the ancient derelict's life or the flawed fetus's life that matters - it is also the blessed happiness and relief and solace the lifesaving hero grants to the 'loved ones' of his victim." That's what the self-perceived wizards or self-appointed spokespeople of the unforunately religious state say.
        But in fact, to be saddled with one's own misery is all any human can bear. To prolong the ordeal of the caretaker who must endure another's misery, too - to force a parent back again into the heartbreak of shepherding his perhaps now crippled child toward more fear and pain and old age and death anyway - AND to saddle the primary victim not only with more miserable life but also the misery of being an added burden to his already burdened "loved ones" - is only another typically hilarious human atrocity.
        The artificial extension of life under the guise of saving it may be the worst of the insults borne by suffering humans. The best thing would be to commission some sane scientist, if such exists, to develop a gentle, painless suicide pill - and then to impeach all the stupid politicians and judges in the way until all that are left are the few sane enough to immediately legalize the production and free distribution of that pill, without any useless doctor's interference, to everyone who wants it. That would be the civilized thing to do.
        We don't need to exist. Since we exist, we have the existential right to hang on to the experience if we individually want to. But let's impeach the imaginary gods and all their priests who tell us lies about what we want - and Mother Nature, too. Let's be sensible about it. Those who want to live - fine, let them live - healthy, young, old, blind, legless, whatever. And if they want to overpay some doctor to keep them conscious of their misery for a little longer - fine, too. Those who need time to gather their courage - fine, leave them alone, to cry or lament or giggle insanely, whatever.
        But let us not butt officiously into people's private lives and deaths and legally or religiously force them to be temporarily saved and then pat ourselves on the back for it. Only religious bestiality could savor such an act of torture, i.e. the enforced preservation of breath and consciousness in the sacrificial victim so the stupid godlies can imagine they're being good and so their ugly imaginary god can continue to bask in the tribute of pain paid to its bloody imaginary conceit.

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