How to Die in Oregon

In 1997, Oregon became the first American state—and the third place anywhere—to legalize physician assisted dying.* Since then, eight other states and the District of Columbia have followed. The title of this post is the title of a documentary about the Oregon law. Frontline's The Suicide Plan, a related documentary, concerns assisted suicide in places where it's either illegal or a person doesn't qualify under current law. For example, the Oregon law requires that death be expected within six months and that the patient be able to take the required medication without assistance, the result being that some terminal people kill themselves before they wish, and that non-terminal people are excluded regardless of the severity of their condition.

While the American Medical Association and various handicapped rights groups oppose assisted dying (I was pleased to learn that my own doctor supports it), the bulk of the opposition comes from religious groups and is based upon the following: (1) God allows suffering in order to ennoble the afflicted and their caregivers, and (2) God alone can create life, so God alone must decide when to end life. Given their second argument, evangelical Christianity's military hawkishness and support for the death penalty is at best paradoxical, as is the fact that, this year alone, several states in America's so-called Bible Belt have passed laws to either end or severely restrict abortion and birth control, while also restricting financial assistance to poor families.

**

My own, very liberal, denomination, the Episcopal Church opposes assisted dying based upon the opinion of its General Convention that Christ, had he thought to address the issue, would have opposed it. I doubt that the church's position carries weight even among its own members, and I maintain that anyone who attempts to contribute to the public dialogue on the basis of authoritarian religious pronouncements has nothing of value to contribute to the public dialogue. "God said it; I believe it; and that settles it," only settles doubts regarding the speaker's intellectual earnestness.

But what of the slippery slope argument, the claim that assisted dying today will lead to outright euthanasia tomorrow? I certainly hope so. Under the Oregon law, if I fall victim to Alzheimer's, I will be too mentally compromised to kill myself by the time my life expectancy is within the six month limit, which means that I will be obliged to end my life early, while alone, and by means that are violent or degrading. Other sufferers—from ALS for example—might retain their mental faculties but be unable to raise the glass to their mouths or swallow its contents. It would therefore take an enormous weight off the minds of many if the law permitted them to have help in dying or, where necessary, to outline in advance the conditions under which they would wish to be euthanized.

But why choose death rather than palliative care? (1) Not all pain can be relieved by narcotics, and some conditions cause excruciating pain for which palliative drugs are completely ineffective unless they are given in such high doses that the patient is rendered unconscious. For example, I was once told that I had Chronic Regional Pain Disease, a condition so horrifically painful that the patient must literally choose between suicide and insanity. (2) No drug can take away the misery and humiliation of having to have one's ass wiped, of needing to be bathed by others, of being too wretched to experience pleasure, and of losing all hope but the hope of a death that cannot come soon enough. (3) In America, the government will only pay for a person's long-term medical care after that person has nothing left to spend, and I, for one, have not spent my life saving only to leave my wife bankrupt so that I might prolong a nightmarish existence that is no longer worthy of the name life.

For those who, despite the things I just listed, continue to "say yes to life," I leave it to them to live, but how dare they deny me the right to die in a peaceful, timely, and dignified manner in the presence of my loved ones! Yet what rankles me most is not their arrogance but that they justify their arrogance by invoking the name of God without a smidgen of evidence to support that invocation.

It is no coincidence that all of the states (plus Washington D.C.) that have passed assisted dying laws are heavily Democratic and secular. The following list of Death with Dignity states*** includes the dates the laws took effect—the Maine law will become active in September. I'm confident that the day will come when the only states that lack such laws will be those of the Bible Belt, a reactionary region that never fails to go kicking and screaming behind the rest of the nation when it comes to the expansion of human rights.

Oregon—1997
Washington—2008
Vermont—2013
California—2016
Colorado—2016
District of Columbia—2017
Hawaii—2019
New Jersey—2019
Maine—2019 


Finally, for my beloved Aussies who constitute the bulk of my active readership, I was pleased to learn that your state of Victoria has recently enacted a "Dying with Dignity" law.****

 
* The Death with Dignity lobby opposes the word suicide, so I will use their preferred terminology out of respect for those who have worked so hard to bring the laws about.

**https://euthanasia.procon.org/view.answers.php?questionID=001320

***https://www.deathwithdignity.org/learn/death-with-dignity-acts/

****https://www.dwdv.org.au/

What Happened at the God, Guns, and Trump Rally

Gadsden Flag

As I crossed the street to the demonstration, a motorcycle gang roared past. During the next 90-minutes, I was cursed twice, and I left with my ears ringing from the shouts and chants. A woman was hit with a bottle; a helmet-wearing man with a wrench taped to his arm was arrested for head-butting. Because the head butter wore a helmet, and I had a helmet (I had biked), I assumed that the woman who cursed me was redirecting her rage at him. The man who cursed me was just plain crazy. When he was unable to get his wheelchair over a rise, I asked if he wanted a push, and he became infuriated. A bearded man wore a dog collar, black short-shorts, and a bra under his purple halter top. Another man wore a red g-string and red tassels on his nipples. The police estimated the attendance at 300, and while that might have been the crowd size at any given time, people were coming and going.

I had thought there would be a clear division between the gun-nuts and the protestors, but the two intermingled. An old man in a red cape and a gold crown went about arguing with the gun people. An old woman had a sign that read, "Tell me why you support Trump; I'm here to listen." I heard people screaming, "Fuck you," and other people responding, "No, fuck YOU!" People had to shout to even be heard by the person next to them.

I sat atop a four-foot high wall that enclosed a large planter, and behind me stood a woman with a shotgun in her hands and a large pistol on her thigh. She was wrapped in a Gadsden flag, and looked down upon the demonstration protectively. Several people carried assault rifles, and I observed that one of them had her finger on the trigger. Most of the gun-nuts were men. I left my first vantage point to stand atop another four-foot wall that was near the center of the rally. The police were unable to keep the crowd out of the street, so they finally closed 8th Avenue. A man walked back and forth through the crowd with a 360-degree camera above his head.

When the bottle was thrown, the mood got ugly, and some of the gun-nuts yelled profanities at the police for "not doing anything," although the thought of police shoving their way through the crowd enmasse was unimaginable. On that and another occasion, I momentarily felt fear, but my overriding emotions were rage and disgust. I wondered what the gun-nuts planned to do if attacked--shoot into the crowd? And what did they imagine the lightly armed cops would do? As for the shotgun carrying woman--did she envision herself heroically emptying her scattergun, throwing it at the crowd, and then drawing her pistol, and didn't she realize how easy it would be for someone to either push her off the planter or grab her ankle from below and pull her off? Then there was the possibility of a gun going off accidentally, the crowd panicking, and other guns being fired at anyone who looked like a member of Antifa, perhaps even at some harmless seventy-year-old with a bike helmet.

When, in 2017, another set of gun-nuts forcibly occupied the offices of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, they would walk around the nearby town of Burns heavily armed. A local woman said of them, "Everybody in the Oregon desert has guns, but it would be offensive to wear them openly." As Tom, a reader of this blog, pointed out two posts ago, there are reasonable gun owners, but people who carry assault rifles into a crowded and emotionally-charged urban area aren't among them. Their goal is to instill fear, to say, "We are heavily armed, so you had better not tread on us by opposing our values."

When Antifa didn't appear, I assumed they were marshaling their resources for the Portland demonstration, and I felt compassion for them. My emotions--though not my head--told me that the enemy of Trump is my friend. I didn't anticipate this. I had stupidly thought that I would at least respect the gun-nuts for their courage in coming, but what respect I might have felt was displaced by disgust and loathing because it was people like myself they were trying to intimidate, and because they looked so utterly stupid. If their goal was simply to protect themselves, they could have carried pepper spray (which is legal in Oregon), but to carry assault rifles that fire small bullets at extremely high velocity, bullets that are designed to tumble through human bones and flesh and kill people blocks away!

When I got home, I learned that the police had detained a Texas man who was on his way to kill people at next week's Portland demonstration. This got me to wondering what the Eugene gun-nuts would have done had one of their number started killing people. They are to public safety what a child with matches is to gasoline, and I'm just sorry that when the explosion happens, others will also pay the price. I can but hope that the ones who survive will be locked away for a long, long time, and that the bloodshed will at long last inspire strongly restrictive gun laws.

What strikes me as I look back a day later is how easily one car backfiring, one firecracker exploding, one gun going off accidentally, or one stupid move by one ignorant, angry, or emotionally disturbed person, could have resulted in multiple deaths. I shudder as I anticipate this week's Portland rally because this kind of event cannot keep happening without one of them ending in disaster.

Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer, American Front, Crew 38, and, Alas, Numerous Others

Today, exactly one week after two larger than usual mass murders, downtown Eugene will simultaneously become the site of a God, Guns, and Trump Rally, a gay pride parade, and a large crafts fair. The Trumpers (who created the above illustration) have promised to bring their AR-15s. They can do this because Oregon is an "open carry" state. Antifa has vowed to confront the Trumpers, and while its members aren't known for using guns, they are known for using their fists. Next weekend, the right-wing demonstrators and their left-wing counterparts will move 110 miles up the road to Portland. 

Since Trump was elected, the local papers have become peppered with hate crime incidents. In the worst one yet, a self-described white nationalist stabbed two people to death and injured a third on a Portland commuter train in 2017. Hate crimes in the nation as a whole rose under Obama only to take off like a rocket under Trump. When asked this week if his rhetoric was partially responsibility for last week's El Paso murders, Trump said that his words don't push people apart but bring them together (he had previously said it's the "America-hater Democrats" who push people apart). Conservative talk radio agrees, and while it and Trump seldom deign to mention right-wing hate crimes, they both argue that Antifa should be singled out for a domestic terrorism designation, although the group's members have yet to kill anyone.

The Southern Poverty Law Center lists fifteen--nearly all of them conservative--hate groups in Oregon*, which are two more than in my historically racist home state of Mississippi. Liberal Eugene  has seen a 380% increase in hate crimes in four years,** although when I came here in 1986, it was an alternative-minded hippie town that many dubbed "The Berkeley of the North," because of its left-wing radicalism. Some of the notorious Weathermen were from here, and the town's Selective Service office was broken into and its files burned. The Grateful Dead hit town every summer; Ken Kesey wrote books and created scandals; nudists enjoyed a publicly-owned beach on the Willamette; and both drug use and nudity were common at the Oregon Country Fair. Then came the bomb-making anarchists who, like many, believed that violence is the threshold to utopia. Now it's right-wing hate groups and--barely noticeable by comparison--Antifa.

I've learned over the years that few things are as bad as our fears make them out to be, yet they can be even worse. I still haven't decided whether to join the protest, which starts in an hour. This might well prove to be yet another day when America demonstrates that it loves guns the way addicts love meth. I am afraid that if I go, I might become one of the dead people whose names scroll across the evening news, yet I'm somehow more afraid of staying home. I need to be a part of this.


*https://www.splcenter.org/hate-map

** https://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/2019/07/oregon-had-the-6th-biggest-rise-in-reported-hate-crimes-in-the-nation-over-a-4-year-period-study-says.html

An interesting article about the Portland Antifa: https://www.wweek.com/news/2019/08/07/portlands-antifascists-punch-white-supremacists-are-they-also-helping-trump/

More Mass Shootings than Days in the Year

As of August 5, which was the 217th day of the year, American has seen 255 mass shootings. In the past nine days, there was:

• A shooting in a historic district of Dayton, Ohio, with nine killed and 27 injured.

• A shooting at Walmart in El Paso, Texas, with 22 killed and at least 24 wounded.

• A shooting at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in the San Francisco Bay Area, with three killed and 15 injured.

• A shooting at a Brooklyn block party, with one killed and 11 injured.

• A shooting at a Walmart in Southaven, Mississippi, with two killed and two injured.*

Trump blames the problem on insanity and the Internet, but not on guns and certainly not on his White Supremacist rhetoric. As his supporters are fond of saying,

"Guns don't kill people; people kill people;" and 

"If you take away their guns, killers will just find some other weapon;" and

"The world is a dangerous place, and I need a gun to protect myself and my family;" and

"The problem isn't too many guns; it's too few guns;" and

"Gun ownership is my Constitutional right;" and 

"Mass murder is the price of freedom;" and

"These killings are God's punishment because America legalized gay marriage;"and

"Reports of mass shootings are just one more example of fake news."

There is now hope. It comes from the fact that America's powerful gun lobby, the National Rifle Association,  has been greatly weakened by internal scandals, combined with the fact that every mass killing is noticeably bringing the country that much closer to effective measures. Unfortunately, these measures will likely happen at the speed of women's equality in Saudi Arabia, and, of course, the people affected all have guns. How many guns? 393 million compared to a mere 133-million for all the armies on earth.**

*https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mass-shootings-2019-more-mass-shootings-than-days-so-far-this-year/ 

**https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_ownership