www.townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/ts20010426.shtml
We have grown so used to meekly accepting their edicts, even on what words we can and cannot use -- "swamp" has virtually disappeared from the English language, replaced by "wetlands," as "bums" has been replaced by "the homeless, "sex" by "gender" -- that it seems only fitting that they should now tell us when to die. In the Hastings Center Report, described as a journal of medical ethics, a medical ethicist says that "health care should be withheld even for those who want to live" if they have already lived beyond the politically correct number of years -- which he suggests might be 75. They are legion and it is we who have supinely accepted their pronouncements on so many things for so long that they see no reason to limit how far they can go. There was a time when Americans told people like this where they could go. The next step is for it to become the government's business. How did we get sucked into collectivizing decisions that were once up to individuals? Collectivism takes on many guises and seldom uses its own real name. Words like "community" and "social" soothe us into thinking that collectivist decision-making is somehow higher and nobler than individual or "selfish" decision-making. But the cold fact is that communities do not make decisions. Individuals who claim to speak for the community impose their decisions on us all. Collectivist dictation can occur from the local level to the international level, and the anointed push it at all levels. They want a bigger role for the UN, for the International Court of Justice at the Hague and for the European Union bureaucrats in Brussels. You cannot even build or remodel your own home without finding yourself under the thumb of local bureaucrats and tangled in red tape. A couple who are trying to have a home built in coastal California are discovering that it takes far less time to build the house than it does to deal with the arbitrary edicts of local bureaucrats and the reams of local regulations. Maybe we are all destined to give up our freedom to those ruthless enough to take it from us -- or glib enough to soothe us into handing it over to them. Then write a letter to your Members of Congress or your local newspapers, who you can find by entering your ZIP code in the boxes below. Also make sure to tell your newspaper editors that they should carry your favorite conservative columnists! NOTE: Columns will not be automatically attached to the emails you send through this tool.
|
http://csua.com/feed/