Just hold on here, you have no right to die!

Yesterday evening there came the shocking news of an incident at our local airport. As passengers were boarding a Continental Airlines flight for Houston, there came a sudden "Thud!" according to one passenger. Shortly, there followed an announcement from the cockpit instructing those on board to drop the shades on the windows, that they would have to evacuate the airplane.

As the unboarding passengers soon came to learn from the few who had witnessed the source of the "thud", a mechanic working on one of the plane's engines had gotten too close as it revved in its preflight takeoff ritual. The mechanic was sucked into the 737's turbine with disastrous results. The plane had to be decommissioned and passengers required to seek alternative flights to their destination. A few needed counseling.

I flashed back to that horrific event as I was reading today's news of the Supreme Court's decision upholding Oregon's Suicide Law.

"Justices have dealt with end-of-life cases before," it read, "most recently in 1997 when the court unanimously ruled that people have no constitutional right to die."

I read that again, "when the court unanimously ruled that people have no constitutional right to die"!

I then heard myself faintly chuckling at the horrible fate of the Continental mechanic, his terrible death, and how he had violated the law by his unconstitutional death. "Holy shit!" I exclaimed in total amazement. "He had no right to die!" I thought, reflecting on how many thousands of others died yesterday without the government's permission.

Yes, my reaction was perverse, but I am merely a spectator of decisions and events too closely juxtaposed.

My mind then flashed to the hundred thousand plus innocent Iraqis killed while trying to deliver "American democracy" to them. "The court unanimously ruled that people have no constitutional right to die." Unless, I guess, the state decides to validate your ticket outta here. Then it will expedite the process.

Next I remembered the first news of the day that greeted me. Of Clarence Ray Allen. He was the oldest California inmate on that state's death row. Until today began at midnight when, a few minutes past his 76th birthday that ended at the stoke of twelve, the state of California put him to death.

I then wondered "what if?" What if Clarence Ray Allen, ailing with a number of infirmities, had suffered a heart attack from all the excitement of his birthday a few minutes before midnight?

I heard myself repeating the words of the article on the Supreme Court's Oregon suicide law once more. "The court unanimously ruled that people have no constitutional right to die."

I'm sure--out of obeyance for the law of the land--Clarence Ray Allen would have gotten the best possible medical attention available to revive him. To restore him to a condition of health where he would be well again. Well enough, anyway, for the state to kill him. Some matters, even as personal as decisions of our own deaths, may not lie with us.

Many, as in the case of Clarence Ray Allen, have no problem with that. I simply find laughable the extraordinary efforts we would likely extend him, to sustain him, until well enough to murder him.

As for terminally ill individuals suffering so miserably at the hands of John Ashcroft and Washington politician's whims, I have extreme problems with that also. I've witnessed a brother experience excruciating pain for great periods of time before finally being extended death's mercy.

But Attorney General John Ashcroft's opinion in 2001 that declared Oregon doctors who helped people die would be violating the federal Controlled Substances Act has been turned back. (Take a deep breath, John, it'd be okay. Trust me. There'd be no one to prosecute because they'd be mercifully dead.)

But it's not over. The congress may decide to next take up the issue. It may still be legislated by our representatives "that people have no constitutional right to die."

As a comment 'eljoven' made to a blog entry here earlier this month regarding the Republican's definition of life, "It begins at conception and ends at birth."

Apparently so. After that, they'll take over the important decisions for you.