Leaderboard

Well, many of them have of them have nowhere to go as they were born in South-Africa and many of them refuse to be cowards who flee when faced with bullying and intimidation.

We hear this all too often: Dignity in dying. Dying with dignity. My issue is with the term, "dignity." Here are the definitions of dignity (Merriam): 1 : formal reserve or seriousness of manner, appearance, or language 2 : the quality or state of being worthy, honored, or esteemed Are we saying a person loses his dignity when he gets ill, or maimed? He loses his worth? He's no longer esteemed? When I think of dying with dignity - I think of someone bravely, or trying to be courageous in facing the inevitable. A cold medicine ad on tv sums it up: "SUCK IT UP." What do you think? Can someone please explain about the dignity-part in death.

Because telling them to "suck it up" is one of the most repulsive unChristian things I've read on this forum.

Meet you there with the flashlight.

I always said I wanted to live on, even on life support and saw no dignity in dying. Recently, a family situation, which had a positive outcome, exposed me to the reality of being dependent on others for the basic needs and I realize it is not the way I want to go. It is not a matter of dignity for me but I just couldn't face it. This is a question that each individual has to make for themselves and we cannot foresee how we will feel until that moment arrives.

At least there weren't any fake Christians telling him to suck it up.

Don't worry folks...surely "hate speech laws" will save the day in South Africa for oppressed "whites" !

Then make your choice before the burden/decision has to fall on somebody else. The government should not be doing it for you. Our advance health directives are already on file at my clinic and attorney's office (with living wills)....I still want hydration...my wife doesn't.

Sometimes when people are dying, they can't do anything for themselves. They are like babies again. They have lost all independence and even the ability to do simple tasks for themselves. They are stuck on pain-killing drips while they lie in their beds shitting themselves. It gets to the point where you just want to die and, perhaps, take a few of the people who say they should just suck it up with them.

That is a good answer, but not the right one (although part of it). I have a very simple but firm definition of when and how wealth is being created. When you add value to a resource or deliver a service NEEDED to support that activity. EVERYTHING else we do in our economy is merely redistributing wealth thusly created. I will try not to get too detailed, but some generalization needed for brevity. The person who starts and runs a business doing these things, yes, but this also applies to every employee. There are some clean lines in the sand, but a lot of very gray areas. Let's start with the typical family. If we assume 2 kids, and looking only at that 20 year window when they are raising that family. For this example, let's consider two parents, two dependent children and two surviving granparents who have retired. In this case, Mom is at home. There is only one person actually working in this example, and then, we have to consider what he or she is actually doing. If the breadwinner is mining iron ore, pretty simple to decide wealth is being created. If making it into steel, ditto. If fabricating something from that steel (a car, a bringe, etc.) same. We can probably agree that everyone who puts a hand on a piece of steel is productive. What if that person works for a bank? Well, if they are doing some of the things that genuinely are needed to run our economy (keeping accounts, loans, mortgages, etc.) then that is a necessary service. If they are working in finance, let's say derivatives, then any money they "make" is simply paying off a bet that someone made (either win or lose), but no value was added. They are no different from the welfare Mom with a half dozen dependent kids or the criminal incarcerated for his activities - they merely redisitribute wealth. I even have to question the entire real estate business - in most cases, even building a structure if that structure is not needed for the creation of wealth, then no wealth is being created - in fact it is being redistributed from the productive part of the economy to the dependent part. As I hope you can see, not very many people in our society create any wealth. The size of your pay packet or the percieved importance of your position does not necessarily corealte with how productive and contributory you are to the economy, or society in general. What we have right now is a very lopsided economy with far too many people being given the privilege (dispensed mostly by government) to take a dissporportinately large part of the resources for activities that do not contribute to either bettering the economy or society. Just growth for the sake of growth is actually a very negative thing, since we start measuring the value of speculative gain and confusing it with increased overall wealth. The only reason we can keep on doing this, so far, is that we have a very large natural resource base to exploit to support a very small population. Also, because we blindly have mortgaged our children's future to pay for some of this largess (a trillion dollars of debt is not sustainable - unless we learn to manage what we do with the rest of our economy to create wealth instead of merely redistribute it and inflate the numbers speculatively). Later.

When I moved to Vancouver from Montreal several decades ago I did feel like I was actually living in an American state after awhile. Vancouver does have a lot more in common with Seattle than with Toronto or Montreal.

If you were a white born in South-Africa would you flee the current very hostile environment towards you? Difficult to say. Hundreds of thousands have fled but similarly many times more have stayed put. Why haven't they gone away? Have they nowhere to go or don't they have money to leave? Or perhaps, the likeliest answer, some people are not cowards.

Nice to know that you're all for mass executions. That's very progressive of you.

True..but hardly a surprise. We have seen this before in other nations, especially those ruled by Marxist governments. "Truth and Reconciliation" was just foreplay to "we are taking the land".