Bambi, Britannia, and Difficult Choices

The purpose of this blog is to discuss MY paranoia and what I'm doing about it. I'm paranoid that our culture / society / government / energy & resource infrastructure has already begun to implode around us - we're just slow to pick up on the signals. This blog is not intended as a critique of the US federal government, the US president, or any of the other nimrods who are running this once-great nation into the rubbish bin. Such critiques are a happy by-product of my verbal flight to the countryside. This blog entry in particular is intended to discuss some very difficult choices my paranoid exile will require. For instance, I don't like wild game, but Bambi is on the menu pretty darn quick if I have to fend for myself (as I predict). That's a tough choice. No it's not; it's an easy choice with a less than preferable outcome. So, too, is the question of Quality of Life (hereinafter QoL). If I head off into the woods (and stay there), I am going to forgo a lot of options that might impinge upon my QoL. And here I digress, momentarily, to a discussion tres politique.

The British National(ized) Health Service is what it is - a gatekeeper between medical resources and the people who consume them. UK's NHS is the third largest employer IN THE WORLD - a staggering statistic that sadly has little correlation to the quality or quantity of healthcare delivered. The NHS has a NICE bunch of bureaucrats that determine whether the quality of life you would gain from a service rendered is worth the cost. I'm dead serious - emphasis 'dead'. [if Wikipedia sources offend, please double-check all these claims and data, register your own blog, and post away] The point of all of this... governments simply should not be empowered to deny services based on QoL determinations. Life is life, it is not a risk-reward, return-on-investment proposition. Life is at once fragile and robust, a treasure and a responsibility.

My soul chastens me to include this passage from the Old Testament of the Bible:

I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death , the blessing and the curse. So choose life in order that you may live, you and your descendants
(Deuteronomy 30:19)

Life is nothing to squander, dissipate, diminish, or negotiate. At the same time, life is not something to be grasped. By that I mean that life does have a cycle which concludes with a free visit to The Judge. There is a time to be born and there is a time to die. The age-old question is when is that time and how will we know? The Brits have decided that your time to die is when the cost to sustain you simply isn't "worth it". Having taken this step, euthanasia, eugenics, and abortion-on-demand can't be far behind... see, not far behind at all.

Okay, let's keep moving away from politics and toward the question of Quality of Life. When I first penned Magnum Opus (Part 1.a), my wife asked me if I was willing to give up the good advancements of the Industrial Revolution. If I go live on my Plan B rural compound and contract cancer (pick a flavor) at age 55, I could suffer a painful illness and die an ignominious early death. (In Plan A world, this cancer could possibly be cured with a pill, a whirl in a microwave, or cut out with a sharp, sharp knife and I could live to see my grandkids get married.) I could contract cancer or I could get my darn fool leg caught under a tree I'm chopping down and starve to death.

The point is, the Industrial Revolution has given us the cunning to improve both quality and quantity of life, but it is life with an expiration date. I believe life is to be honored and cherished, but not gripped and coveted. I've watched loved ones, friends, and parishioners linger in failing health, spending their last months in a hospital ward, hospice, or darkened bedroom. I am on the razor's edge - despising euthanasia and yet embracing death that could be prevented (in terms of when, not whether). I've often spoken of myself "taking a long walk in the woods" when the quality of life has passed. But that is something that only I (and my family) can determine. There is something... the only word I can think of is "unholy"... yes, there is something unholy about a third-party setting my expiration date based on an actuary's cost-benefit analysis. Whether the grid goes down, the dollar collapses, Obama declares martial law on even the air I breathe, or I just decide it'll be superfun to live in a cabin in the woods, I know that turning my back on the "advances" of the IR will likely mean I die years or even decades before I would have otherwise. And in the end, I'll be just as dead as everyone else. But that will be my choice, as it only can and must be.

Somewhere in all this is the matter of "moral peril". To say more is a little beyond the paranoid mission of CHS Plan B so I'll park the wagon here. I hope that me thinking out loud about this will prompt my scores of readers to have some indepth conversations with family and think about how tightly you are grasping this whisper called life. God bless you.

[Editor's note: I hope you'll take the time to read the information on the UK NHS. And I don't want to be a scaremonger, I mean a fearmonger, but, "ripped from today's headlines" this article is among many that critique the circumstances of a tragic death that may have been prevented in a different kind of healthcare delivery system.]

In the next blog entry, let's talk about happy things... like knives.
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