There was too much to talk about this past week. A deadly disease is visiting the United States: one man is dead, and two nurses who treated him are hospitalized. A cop murderer in PA has spent weeks on the lam and the local town is postponing Halloween to protect its citizenry. Joan Rivers’ death appears to be related to propofol, the same anesthetic medication which killed Michael Jackson.
But a few stronger news stories stood out this week.
A woman named Brittany Maynard has terminal brain cancer, and her doctors have been frank with her about the kind of death she will face: she has decided instead to end her life her own way, using assisted suicide laws in her current resident state. With her family by her side, on November 1st she will take a combination of drugs which will shut down her body and prematurely end the vicious assault of the tumors which are torturing her. When you think about cancer, it is a kamikaze disease, killing itself in the process of killing its host. Both are a waste. I recall an interesting scene in the film Soylent Green, in which Edward G. Robinson’s aging character “goes home” to a spa-like building in which he is given a drink which will end his life in 20 minutes, and he relaxes while movies of things and places he loved are shown around him and, essentially, has a peaceful ending his way. What happened after that is for you to find out if you’ve never seen the movie, but it involves Charlton Heston and food alternatives in a post-modern wasteland Earth. What it comes to is this: when we die, it’s not always the most pleasant way, but we are so stubbornly tethered to ideas about sustaining and prolonging life at any cost ,which hold us prisoner to our fears about the end of mortality, we can’t find it within us to offer the options of peaceful passing. We often treat our beloved pets better than we treat our elderly and terminally ill. May Brittany find the journey out of here a good one.
A Philadelphia charter school had some difficulty this past week, when their enrolled students exceeded the caps established by agreement when the school opened. The school’s founder lost an appeal in court and must now hold a lottery to determine which students can stay at the facility. The student population must be cut from 1300 to 675. It is hurtful to the students, who are only weeks into the school year, and parents must find alternative education options quickly if their children don’t make the cut, but the most disturbing aspect has to be the inabilities of the parents to communicate their frustration at the situation. On camera it was obvious that education has failed multiple generations, and schools which are struggling to find funding to teach the language of the world and obliterate the language of the street are losing the battle. It is because the parents were not educated properly that Philadelphia owes it to their children to break the cycle of poor education. All the schools are being affected, but the college campuses and job markets will feel the aftereffects years from now. How will children learn STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) if they can’t even spell “stem?”
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