I cringe to see death without reasonable cause. I was born that way .This is obviously a bias that is not shared by the majority of the rest of the human species, or defined much differently by them. My curse has always been being terribly slow at everything, and fully realizing this was my personal and unchanging bias was no exception. It has taken me all of my life to understand how to reconcile an innate antipathy toward unnecessary death against other concepts going on in my culture, religions, mythology, customs, mores, family values, national politics, and work. We get caught up in life. We adapt, because we think that is the right thing to do, the customs of our society. If we don’t follow the rules of our particular society, we find ourselves becoming unwanted outsiders from that group. Some of that molding is probably healthy, teaching those of us with wild behavior to accept the norms of our society, and lead more docile lives. We tend to think that if our beliefs vary from those held by those in power in that society, that our beliefs are wrong, and need to be modified. Many of our beliefs do need that modification.
On the other hand, if the norms of our society are unhealthy, it is devilishly difficult to change them, often requiring minor cataclysms. We did not get children’s rights, women’s rights, civil racial rights, and gay rights without going through those struggles. It seems to me that we may need the same kind of quarrelsome dispute to stop unnecessary human, animal and species death. Our society has just not understood, as yet, that this respect for all other life is a key to our long term survival. In my opinion, unless we develop that universal respect for all life, we are not going to survive much longer as a species. Either we find the means to eliminate the unnecessary deaths of other humans and other species, or we can probably say goodbye to virtually all life within the next several centuries.
When I was in early grade school, my father took me and my two older brothers out to the back alfalfa field to hunt for rabbits. We were going to have hasenpfeffer for dinner. It sounded like a great adventure to me. We started walking through the alfalfa, my dad and my brothers all carrying guns, and me holding my father’s hand. Then we scared up a rabbit, which went bounding off. There were shouts, the guns blared, and the rabbit tumbled in the field. My father asked me to hold it up by the ears, to show the prize they had killed. I did that, but could not suppress the tears streaming down my face. All the rest of my family laughed at me for being so sentimental, but to me it was a great deal more than that. When they shot another, I declined to hold it up as a prize. I fell quiet the rest of the day, and went off to a corner of the house by myself. We had rabbit stew for supper that night. It did not taste very good to me. I’ve elected to not have rabbit stew the rest of my life.
A few years later, when I had a BB gun, I loved to go out back and do target shooting. I got pretty good at judging the distance and drop of the BB pellet to that target, and had great fun at becoming a juvenile marksman, although a rather inaccurate one. One day, however, as I came back home past the barn, I saw a young rabbit cowering and frozen still in a wood pile. Thinking that what you were supposed to do when you encountered a rabbit was to shoot it, I shot it in the head. It did not die, and instead looked deathly frightened. So I shot it several more times in the head, watching its eyes bulge more with each shot, until it died. Afterward, I felt sick inside. I had caused a needless death of an innocent living creature. I felt, somewhere in my gut, that it was wrong to kill anything, unless that killing was necessary to support other life. I carried the dead rabbit off to the woods, to give it a remorseful burial site, put the BB gun away, and moped around the house for weeks. I could not understand my anguish at killing on a whim, even though that was something everyone else I knew did with relish. Something was wrong with me. I did not fit in.
When I was an early teen, my mother asked me to go out to the hen house, catch a chicken, and chop its head off so she could fix it for dinner. I was not enamored with that task, but thought I should do as she told. I managed to catch a hen, hold it by its legs as it struggled, then maneuver it to a block of wood in order to use a hatchet on its neck. Her head flopped off, her face frozen in a frightened squawk, beak open, while the rest of her body suddenly went wild. It was twitching, jumping, contorting, rolling, convulsing in vehement protest toward this violent death, while blood spurted from its neck all over the surrounding ground. I was not quite prepared to see the violence of sudden death. After the hen stopped moving, I took it in to my mom, and watched fascinated as she immediately plunged it into hot water. Soon thereafter, she took the chicken out of the pot, started ripping off feathers, then used a wire brush to rub away down. She asked me to take the feathers out to the trash. I was quite taken by this sudden change of fortune, how something that is at one minute vitally alive, becomes a few minutes later, just trash. The rest of my family seemed to greatly enjoy their chicken dinner. I could hardly touch it. The next day we had chicken soup. The day after that we had some kind of vegetable stew, which had pieces of chicken meat in it. I gave up hunting after that episode, and took up football instead. I was still trying to figure out why I detested preventable death so much.
There may be some who will immediately say that I am simply a squeamish man who does not want to face the realities of life, and have been that way since childhood. Perhaps this is so; I am a rather cautious person. I do have one piece of rebuttal, however. I have seen more torn, fractured, disfigured, gushing, exsanguinating, hemorrhaging, slashed open, brain oozing, ruptured organ, missing extremity, mashed face, stool contaminated injuries of the human body than many of our population can imagine. I have dealt with each of those violent injuries with immediacy, urgency and resolve, and have done my best to save those lives. I have seen more death and sorrowed with loved ones more than most all other members of our society. I have met all of these problems without hesitation and with the best that I could offer, in an effort to save those lives. I accept death and violence as a normal part of life. I sorrow at seeing death and violence before its time.
Without knowing exactly why I was doing what I was doing, there came a later time to first, protest against unnecessary death, and then to spend a lifetime fighting against premature death. College went by in a blur of rapidly expanding knowledge, rapidly expanding progression of personal expression, formation of key philosophical tenets, and abiding love for those professors who opened my eyes to the rest of the world. It taught me to love literature, love the nuances of language, and believe that it was time to bring my beliefs to action, when faced with those decisions. I was preparing to go on to graduate school, to further study literature and language, when the draft board called my number. I refused to go off to Korea and kill some other human in order to support American businesses, and mistaken American politicians, as previously recounted. I preferred to spend my time in jail, rather than kill someone else. When the draft board, convinced by my father and brother, accepted sending me instead to an alternative service, I was assigned to work at the Psychiatric Institute at Independence, Iowa. That assignment allowed me to serve my country for two years, but not in the military. At that job, I had to fend off other employees, who repeatedly goaded me, offering to fight because I had refused to go off to war. I don’t blame those veterans for hating me. They were really loyal people, who were doing what they were asked to do, were patriotically standing up for their country, and hated anyone else who would not also support their country with whatever it took, even if that meant going off to war. They were loyal citizens, for whom I had great respect, but it was clear they did not dislike unnecessary death as much as I disliked death.
That experience changed all the rest of my life, as it does for all of us who serve our country for two or more years, whether in the military or elsewhere. I discovered the medical profession, which contained an immense potential, to which I had been blind up to that time in my life. That profession was a grand opportunity to fight against a powerful foe, called death. I felt the need to use that powerful tool to the utmost of my ability. For that reason, I kept on going in my education until there were no additional levels of advanced study that I could attend. I spent a total of thirteen additional years of study, after college, at minimum wage, trying to be the best opponent of death that I could be. I have, since that prolonged education, taken out thousands of lung cancers, and have taken out thousands of other death causing cancers in other organs of the body. I have run and participated in hundreds of cardiac arrest codes, have spent twelve to sixteen hour days responding to ICU crises. I have participated in starting a cancer unit in our hospital and have contributed toward developing a cancer center in our community. I have rejoiced when we have won some of those battles, and have joy when I see those people still alive and well years later. I have run tuberculosis centers in two separate communities, and have treated hundreds of people so they will not die of that disease. I have suffered with the families every time we lost an intense battle with death. I have answered thousands of emergency room calls, to care for people who need immediate attention to life-threatening problems. I have spent ten hours or more at a time in surgery, trying to preserve life for someone whose existence hangs in the balance. I have given health back to thousands of people who did not have health and quality of life. None of it ever was enough. There was always that all-powerful foe, who eventually won at some point in the future. It was an intense pleasure, however, every time we won the battle, preserving life for a while longer, rather than this universal, and eventually victorious, enemy.
We would not progress, to become humans, or as any other species, without death to allow those forms of life which are the most adaptable to develop and progress toward higher forms of life. Without death, we would probably still be amoebas, or something less. Life and death are a balance, neither of which can exist by itself in this universe. This is the way this universe was made. And this universe does not give a hoot about whether life or death is dominant at any one time. It does not care.
We therefore come to a most unexpected conclusion: death has little to do with ethics. Death is simply the earlier end result when we are unethical. Ethics relates only to life, and how we manage our lives in relationship to other lives. Ethics means never taking any life unless it is necessary to preserve some other life. Ethics means fighting against death to preserve any functioning life that can still contribute to society, and reach fulfillment, as much as our reserves will allow. Ethics means never taking another life for pleasure, self-gratification, sport, revenge, or power. Ethics means taking care of the only body and mind that we were given as best we can, to remain contributing members of society as long as possible. If we don’t do these things, in an effort to support functioning and contributing life as long as possible, that becomes unethical. When we are unethical, as here defined, then death comes earlier than is best for the preservation of all life.