Amerika

Conservatives want strong sanctity of life. Contrary to what the Left will tell you, this is a complex argument and outlook. Sanctity of life demands that we respect life, which seemingly paradoxically means preserving the innocent and killing off the guilty. This baffles most people.

Consider the flip side of the argument. If you love something, you hate what threatens it, or at least are ready to go to war against it and are vigilant about it. If you honestly hate something, then, it is a threat to what you love; those who threaten innocent life are a violation of sanctity of life and must be killed.

The Left has adulterated and confused this principle for many years. In their eyes, everyone is innocent because everyone is equal, which means that the only difference between “good” and “evil” is exterior circumstance. In their view, people steal and kill because they are poor.

That viewpoint ignores all of the people who, despite being poor, manage to go through life without stealing or killing. It also ignores those who are wealthy and also kill. It makes no sense, like all Leftist dogma, and is passed on with the usual air of religious wisdom despite being merely reality-dodging.

We might say that sanctity of life is a quality argument versus a quantity one. Leftists want us to save everyone, even the bad, but this results in lower quality of people and of life experience. The Right wants to make life sacred, which requires both nurturing and killing, much as tending a garden does.

Right now, Alfie Evans — the toddler in the UK dying of an incurable disease — has become a football in politics. The Right finds it outrageous that he has been condemned to death by the State, and it will not even allow his parents to move him to another hospital abroad.

Emotions run high mainly because of the futility of the situation. Doctors diagnosed him with a rare neurological condition that destroyed most of his brain. His best hope in life is to be a body in a bed for the rest of his days, according to the medical experts.

We know Alfie is doomed, then, either to death or to a non-life. What frustrates us here is the State bureaucracy telling people what they must do with their child in life or death matters. Much like child protective services overreaching, this is another case of the little guy versus the machine, which always wins.

Sanctity of life suffers in this case. The choice of life or death has been taken from the realm of the natural into that of bureaucracy and the de facto “death panels” necessary for a socialized medical system that is always running short on resources.

The utilitarian approach which says that we can help more people with this money instead of having this one life be valuable also offends us. We are individuals, we want to say, but then we realize it is not true. We are numbers. The State operates by ensuring that enough of us are behaving in certain ways to keep the system afloat.

Any thought of what is sacred in life or death has been discarded and replaced by the equivalent of an Excel spreadsheet. Even worse than the most capitalism-induced nightmare, this bureaucratic nightmare decides who lives and who dies based on where the money goes. It appalls us.

However, this is the future we have chosen. “Free” healthcare means that choices must be made, because the money comes from somewhere, and it is not infinite. “Equal” social order means that we are a mob of faceless numbers, with bureaucrats telling us what to do and no wise elders to appeal to when things go wrong.

None of us feel good about what has happened to Alfie Evans. However, he is a symbol of how our society ignores the importance of life itself. Our outrage, and that queasy sickening feeling in our gut, reflect that we have chosen the wrong path, even more than our emotions about Alfie and his imminent demise.

Tags: alfie evans, death panels, socialized medicine, triage