22 replies to this topic

[brokenportal]

"Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight." ~Albert Schweitzer

Life and death are in your hands.

If you watch somebody put a gun to somebody’s head and then watch while they slowly pull the trigger, then you helped pull the trigger. If you support programs to help stop people from becoming killers, and to stop killers, then you are part of the global riddance of killers.



It makes no difference if you can play with rocks or a sub atomic virtual reality dimension transporter if you are going to obliterate for eternity 80 short year blinks later.

If somebody writes an eloquent book, binds it and then burns it, it is better to have never written the book. If a wondrous dimension exists that no consciousness, nothing, has ever known, and it is snuffed out before anything ever can then it may as well have never existed.

Mummies, religion, the fountain of youth, the holy grail, sorcery, countless snake oils, afterlife’s, reincarnation, humanity has long desperately striven to put the brakes on the slow terrifying skid into obliteration.

The hellish chopping block of death drips with the blood of an eternity of viciously tortured lives. The slide to that block will be stopped, and there will be a last to die on it. This is why we FIGHT for indefinite life extension.



This
is why, as Kahlil Gibran would say, we “rest in reason, and
MOVE
in passion.”

This is why John Donne said,
"No man
is an island, entire of itself.
Every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind
and therefore
never send to know for whom the bell tolls,
it tolls for thee."

This is why Dante wrote that,

“The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crises maintain their neutrality”

This is why Einstein said that, “The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.”

So rest in reason, and MOVE! like you mean it.

Edited by brokenportal, 07 November 2011 - 02:56 AM.

[Droplet]

I like this one. Another one that should be perhaps made into a leaflet or even a Youtube speech.

[Droplet]

I am going to resurrect this thread, as I wish to share something relating to this that I had the misfortune of stumbling upon today. I was enjoying a Sunday stroll and there was an old man, I'd guess in his eighties, bent over and holding onto a bus shelter to stay upright. I thought that in that state he couldn't have gotten far and the fact that he was shuffling about in slippers told me that he had probably absconded from a nearby nursing home. I thought that maybe he would be able to tell me where he lived so I decided I'd help him back to wherever it was he had walked from. Things went from bad to worse when I realised that he could barely communicate and didn't know where he lived. He was holding onto me and I was going to walk him to the nearest nursing home (the particular road had lots of them) or call the police if I couldn't coax him to come with me. At some point although I tried to tell him to grab onto my arm a little tighter, he lost his grip and fell leaving me to call the ambulance.

The saddest part was knowing that at some point he was a man with a mind and memories and now was reduced to being little more than a helpless baby grasping at to be pulled up from the ground. This is the sort of suffering that is often forgotten and locked behind the walls of nursing establishments. It got me thinking that the suffering that we spare ourselves the sight of is already covered up away from us unless it is one of our own. It is such a shame that we cannot have footage showing people what aging actually does in all of the horrible details for our cause. I notice that when talking about getting old, most people will just keep the conversation to getting wrinkles and their outer shells looking just a bit worse than before. Rarely do I hear people voice their fears over the far worse fate in store.

[brokenportal]

That's terrible, and the kind of experience I wish more people could go through to try to shake them from their indifference. We have gradually gotten used to the notion that some people are old and that's the way they are. But if we were all in a room and could temporarily be rendered so that our faculties were gone, like being drunk except with out the glee, and with your thought process still relatively in tact, and this went on for days and we weren't told when it would subside, then I bet we would get scared really quick, and want out of that condition as soon as possible.

[Droplet]

That's terrible, and the kind of experience I wish more people could go through to try to shake them from their indifference. We have gradually gotten used to the notion that some people are old and that's the way they are. But if we were all in a room and could temporarily be rendered so that our faculties were gone, like being drunk except with out the glee, and with your thought process still relatively in tact, and this went on for days and we weren't told when it would subside, then I bet we would get scared really quick, and want out of that condition as soon as possible.

It made me quite angry and sad at the same time. I wish everyone could experience something like this at least once or at least be forced to confront it.

[ViolettVol]

That's terrible, and the kind of experience I wish more people could go through to try to shake them from their indifference. We have gradually gotten used to the notion that some people are old and that's the way they are. But if we were all in a room and could temporarily be rendered so that our faculties were gone, like being drunk except with out the glee, and with your thought process still relatively in tact, and this went on for days and we weren't told when it would subside, then I bet we would get scared really quick, and want out of that condition as soon as possible.

It made me quite angry and sad at the same time. I wish everyone could experience something like this at least once or at least be forced to confront it.

I'm experiecing something similar with my gradmother right now and its heartbreaking. If i hear once more the phraze '"aging gracefully/" and "accepting it", I'm going to explode and do some fqacial damage at least. Signing up for boxing clacc. Whos's with me? Why cant people accept aging REALLY sucks and start doing somethig about it NOW?

[Droplet]

[I'm experiecing something similar with my gradmother right now and its heartbreaking. If i hear once more the phraze '"aging gracefully/" and "accepting it", I'm going to explode and do some fqacial damage at least. Signing up for boxing clacc. Whos's with me? Why cant people accept aging REALLY sucks and start doing somethig about it NOW?

Just about everyone here feels the same and the acceptance of it all drives me up the wall! Especially from my own family.

[brokenportal]

Ya aging gracefully would be like torturing somebody nicely, or crashing a car safely.

Making excuses for death and dying is laziness, lazy thinking. They are just glossing over the intricacy of the thinking involved with facing death. It's a little bit complex, but its not that hard, all they have do is think about it. Death makes pain and waste of awesome information and perspective filled sensory machines (people). You wouldn't smash less valuable machines like your printer or your cell phone and bury it in the dirt. Science knows how to work on biology, we are getting better and better at it. The future is sure to be grand and there is a ton of stuff yet to figure out in this incredible mysterious universe. Ergo, don't be stupid and respond to this scenario with "lets age gracefully and accept it". That's the weak minded mentality that tends to get people killed in most every lethal situation.

[Droplet]

Ya aging gracefully would be like torturing somebody nicely, or crashing a car safely.

Making excuses for death and dying is laziness, lazy thinking. They are just glossing over the intricacy of the thinking involved with facing death. It's a little bit complex, but its not that hard, all they have do is think about it. Death makes pain and waste of awesome information and perspective filled sensory machines (people). You wouldn't smash less valuable machines like your printer or your cell phone and bury it in the dirt. Science knows how to work on biology, we are getting better and better at it. The future is sure to be grand and there is a ton of stuff yet to figure out in this incredible mysterious universe. Ergo, don't be stupid and respond to this scenario with "lets age gracefully and accept it". That's the weak minded mentality that tends to get people killed in most every lethal situation.

Spot on! :D

[Droplet]

Today I am brought once again face-to-face with the suffering caused by old age. In the town centre, an old lady had fallen down. She was unable to get up herself from a simple fall that a younger person would spring up from. There was a circle of people around her, some there trying to help and others merely voyeurs. They were standing there just looking on as if "this is a normal process, someone gets old, frail and falls down." I walked on, as people were already doing something. Round the corner, a similar thing had happened but this time to a larger person who was walking on a crutch. She was not really old but not young either.

It is really cruel and horrible how aging robs us of the ability to do even the smallest things and makes our bodies so worn that the slightest injury can become debilitating disability. I knew in a busy town centre that I was the only person who was angered at this, angry at how people accept blindly. "It's not natural" people harp on about. Well for a species that has achieved so much by overriding and changing nature, I'd argue that accepting suffering on an enormous scale for millenia and not trying to find a way round it is "not natural."

Oh and let's not forget that today I took a call from someone upset whose mother had died of old age. It's not just pain for the person who has become sick and disabled but also for those that had to watch it and lose someone just because nature puts a silly time limit on us. Why is wanting to stop unnecessessary suffering looked upon as somehow "wrong"? Also, if there is a god capable of showing mercy, why would s/he NOT want us to try to cure horrible conditions if we are able to?

I bet none of the people who saw the elderly people on the ground will even question it today, they will carry on in their little rut and never dare to dream of stopping this once and for all.

Edited by Droplet, 17 February 2012 - 06:47 PM.

[brokenportal]

I bet none of the people who saw the elderly people on the ground will even question it today, they will carry on in their little rut and never dare to dream of stopping this once and for all.

That's the crux of our whole predicament it seems. So where do we go from there? Where is the path out of that? That's a question I'm constantly asking myself when I encounter dilemmas. It seems that maybe the lack of people like that asking that question is potentially part of the cause of the dilemma.

I'm reminded of the notion that in movements they find that of around 1 million onlookers, you get roughly 1,000 passive supporters, and of them you can get roughly 100 members, and of 100 members you can get roughly 2 or 3 fully committed people. I was compiling the registered user, member and lifetime member data the other day and those are basically how the numbers stack up too. There are about 16,000 registrants, 175 members and about 5 to 15 volunteers during any given month. So, is that the way it will always be? Slowly growing at those rates? Im not sure. Im very inclined to continue to push for a much larger percentage of active supporter to passive supporter, but then also it seems that maybe a part of this solution is to not only want them to take accountability as the main focus, but to get more of the fully committed supporters, the leaders, the project managers, the action takers, to understand the importance of helping each potential new leader to step up, for them all to keep an eye to pushing for their relative percentage of members and supporters.

[Droplet]

Just recently, this article has been in the newspaper. Dementia...if the horrible illnesses of aging don't rob you, means to bring them under control will. A very sad account of so called "chemical cosh" drugs, antipsychotics being used for dementia patients that slowly kill their personalities as their brains are already declining.

http://www.dailyreco...86908-23767225/

[Droplet]

When you are frail, you end up dependent on people. There is now a call, at least here in the UK, for the elderly to be treated with more dignity and compassion. Whilst it's a great thing that they are considering sacking people without compassion, how sad that people have to degrade into a dependant state in the first place. :(

Read the article here: http://www.politics....-elderly-people

[Droplet]

Aging: not just a cruel fate but a ticking timebomb for society: http://www.alzheimer...php?newsID=1169

Consider this sad story:
http://www.duluthnew...group/homepage/

Edited by Droplet, 08 March 2012 - 12:37 PM.

[brokenportal]

Those are four good articles for the internet networking team too there Droplet.

http://www.longecity...er/page__st__30

If you also want to post them there then people know to go there and leave comments that are pro indefinite life extension. The more pro indefinite life extension comments we can get out there in the places across the internet that dont really think too much about this cause yet, the faster we can help spread it. You already knew that, just restating that important point.

[Droplet]

Never knew of that particular thread, thanks for bringing it to my attention.

[Droplet]

Poached from articles already out up here but very relevant:
http://www.bbc.co.uk...-get-older.html

http://www.telegraph...y-Anderson.html

This one is horrible:
http://www.dailymail...7-dementia.html

This is a good topic to keep in the minds of people.

[Droplet]

Nurses treat fewer than half of dying patients with dignity:
http://www.dailymail...o=feeds-newsxml

[Droplet]

This is disgusting. Elderly people deprived food and water to die more quickly:

Hospitals may be withholding food and drink from elderly patients so they die quicker to cut costs and save on bad spaces, leading doctors have warned.
Thousands of terminally ill people are placed on a 'care pathway' every year to hasten the ends of their lives.
But in a letter to the Daily Telegraph, six doctors who specialise in elderly care said hospitals across the UK could be using the controversial practice to ease the pressure on resources.

...

But the six experts told the Daily Telegraph that in the elderly, natural death was more often free of pain and distress.
The group warned that not all doctors were acquiring the correct consent from patients and are failing to ask about what they wanted while they were still able to decide.

The doctors say that this has led to an increase in patients carrying a card stating that they do not want this 'pathway' treatment in the last days of their lives.

Read more: http://www.dailymail...l#ixzz20CGcbpff

Edited by Droplet, 10 July 2012 - 06:04 AM.

[Droplet]

There was a nasty documentary on LBC (London's Biggest Conversation) last night that I caught part of about the increase in aging people in UK and on the topic in the Daily Mail that I commented on in internet networking. They were talking about the burden of the care needs of older people and how the NHS wants to encourage more people to look after their relatives rather than relying on the state. As pointed out, this could open the door to abuse, especially if caring for the person is resented and/or they become unmanageable due to dementia.

It's a shame the majority can't see the suffering is not neccessary and join a cause like this. We really could do with stalls and stuff like other charities have to educate people.

Edited by Droplet, 03 August 2012 - 05:57 AM.