• News
• Fringe
• Sports
• Editorial
• UH Section
• Archives

• About
• Join the Post
• Contact
• Advertising

• E-mail
• Print
• Text size:

Killing another person in cold blood is cowardly, but people have the right to decide for themselves what they do with their body and their life, including ending that life.

It always makes me mad to hear someone say people who commit suicide are cowards or categorically say suicide is “the weak thing to do.” Rather, it’s cowardly to deride people who can’t defend themselves (in this case because they’re dead), especially if the accusers haven’t experienced anything that would make them consider killing themselves. Above all, it’s useless because it’s impossible to know a person’s dying thoughts.

It is of no use to universally condemn suicide since people kill themselves for such a variety of reasons. Killing another person in cold blood is cowardly, but people have the right to decide for themselves what they do with their body and their life, including ending that life.

Suicide, however, hurts the people who were emotionally close to the person committing it. Yet it isn’t fitting that, for instance, a mother should assume the right to stop her son from killing himself just because doing so would make her feel bad.

She should only stop him if she feels he isn’t in a condition to decide or hasn’t spent enough time considering other options. Only rash suicides are regrettable; the rest are liberating.

Blaming an individual for committing suicide implies they have a relation or obligation to other people, ultimately society. Conversely, that means society has an obligation to that person. Society views suicide as morally reprehensible, but if the act of suicide is condemning, it is against the living.

Suicides incited by sudden passions will probably always persist in society. However, the vast majority are preventable.

As it stands, the reasons for committing suicide are a very index of what is wrong in our society, including poverty, unemployment, sexual abuse, substance abuse, depression and other psychiatric disorders.

There are 32,000 suicides in America yearly, only 1 in 6 25 attempts being successful. Seventeen percent of high school students seriously consider committing suicide at some point.

Since the collapse of the U.S.S.R., the Russian suicide rate increased by 150 60 percent and even higher in the former satellite nations, increasing 95 percent in Latvia (cannot find current figure). The United Nations declared, “The transition to a market economy has thus been accompanied by a demographic collapse and a rise in self-destructive behavior...a high social and human cost for their transition to a market economy.”

In most cases suicide is an emphatic “No” to society, and not a complaint against life in general, as the stresses of capitalist society have provoked what are probably the highest suicide rates in human history. Life is happy when it can express itself. It can only be concluded that we live in a culture of alienation and repressed feelings – an anti-culture.

Ours is a culture where 99 percent of adults stop themselves from intervening when they see a parent telling their infant child to “shut-up” in the check out line at the grocery store (because the kid saw some aptly marketed candy they want). “It’s not my kid,” is the reflexive mental reason given, as though the kid was private property.

During my field experience at an elementary school a child had a sizable splinter in his hand. I told the teacher, and she said not to help him because there wasn’t a school nurse and I wasn’t certified.

So the kid sat there with a chunk of wood in his hand, working towards infection. That’s the society we live in, where an adult can’t help a child get a splinter out of his hand without risking legal retribution.

In our culture it’s a faux pas to start a conversation with someone you don’t know on the bus. Instead, it’s considered better to talk on the cell phone to the displeasure of everyone within range or even watch the forever-resented Transit TV.

“What kind of society is it, indeed, where one finds the profoundest solitude in the midst of millions; where one can be overwhelmed by an irrepressible desire to kill oneself without anybody being aware of it?” Jacques Peuchet asked. I ask, is such a society worth preserving? No, it is only worth overhauling.

Suicide indicates not only strong frustrations with society, but also the difficulty of changing it. This is characteristic of a socioeconomic system, which knows the price of everything but the value of nothing. People who commit suicide at least felt a strong conviction, which is more than can be said for a great deal of people.

The problem isn’t merely to prevent suicides, but to end humanity’s alienation – not to issue mass prescriptions of anti-depressants, not to discourage strong emotions, not to settle for desensitization at the price of soul, but to use that psychical energy to tear the system down and build a new society. As Martin Luther King Jr. explained: “We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.”

> Comments