Doctor Death

Dr. Kevorkian is dead, provoking a renewed wave of moral outrage among the religious and the self-righteous. The man appeared to be ghoulish, but his extremism puts the issue of the "right to die" in front of us in a way no panel of philosophers can.

Harry Edwards, for example, is often didactic and obnoxious but no one else has done so much to demand an end to rampant collegiate exploitation of black athletes. Meaningful change demands radical action. You may point to the so-called "peaceful" end to apartheid in South Africa but that would be delusional, given the millions of black South Africans who lost their lives in that struggle.

The 1960s Civil Rights Movement was denounced by many, in particular JFK and Bobby Kennedy, as extremist. Demonstrators were chided for their impatience. Their demonstrations were regarded at best as inconvenient, at worst as insurrectionist.

In the June 6, 2011 New York Times, Ross Douthat charges Kevorkian with murder because Dr. Death assisted in the suicides of individuals for whom autopsies revealed no pathology. Mr. Douthat assumes that, if there is a right to die (and he believes there is not), its supporters must claim it solely for the terminally ill.

A friend of mine at 93 recently "willed" herself to death. I recall this woman as one of the most brilliant individuals I've ever known. She was proud and tough and often said she would prefer death to living without dignity. Yet live without dignity she did for several years, oblivious to the dementia that had stolen her mind. She railed repeatedly and bitterly at her nurturing daughter for disposing of her junker of car that could not be fixed (and in any event my friend had lost her license), and for placing her in a nursing home. My friend demanded that her daughter return the car or "a reasonable facsimile” so she (at 93) could go out and get a job. She grew increasingly nasty and hostile, suspicious to the point of paranoia, of a woman who for many years had spent hours each week caring for her, running errands, and overseeing her meager funds, which had included steering her out of serious trouble with the bank.

Then, over lunch one afternoon, my friend's eyes suddenly cleared. After having denied an event her daughter and her caring buddy recalled, she told them she understood she had lost herself. "I remember not remembering," she said. At last, she realized that her mind had betrayed her. The next morning she didn't get out of bed although there was nothing visibly wrong with her. Going into the hospital, she laughed and joked and flirted with the attendants, her old self. She was placed in a bed and in less than an hour she had drifted out of her life.

The woman I had known 50 years earlier would have been horrified by all those years without showing gratitude while demanding extravagant contributions from others. She would've been mortified to see how little she understood of what was happening around her. As she approached it, wouldn't she have had the right to end her life before losing nearly everything that had made her the person she was?

My husband and I have agreed we do not want to linger as physical beings after our personalities and our intellect have disintegrated. Why should we be denied the right to be remembered for 70 or 80 years of being ourselves? Why should we instead drain our family and friends of their fondest recollections of us, replacing them with images of selfish, cantankerous, foolish shells? I do not say that anyone in the throes of dementia should die. Those who believe life is worth clinging to regardless should be permitted to cling to life, whatever the cost. I merely say that for a person who sees life as a collection of integral experiences, interactions, memories—for someone who wants to passing of a coherent “self” to coincide with the passing of the “container” for that self—this should be an option.

The right to end an existence that plagues us isn't simple. No rights are. The right to free speech ends, or ought to, at the point that speech incites harm to innocent people. Yet how to determine that? The Supreme Court just ruled that corporations have the right to peddle games that penalize children players who fail to accomplish a double rape. All this reminds me of the days when an 18 year old could be shipped to Viet Nam to die but could neither buy a drink nor vote.

We want rights to be carved in stone and their applications to be obvious. But a depressed person who decides on suicide rightly excites our protective instincts. After all, an untreated depression ought not to end in death. The loss of a partner, for example, leading to self-destruction becomes the proverbial permanent solution to a temporary problem.

But I knew a woman whose depression had not yielded to any therapy. Finally she placed herself in the hands of a psychiatrist for shock treatments. She told me that if these failed, she was determined to end her life. This was not a teenaged girl in the throes of hormonal upheaval. This was a mature woman who had endured years of unceasing misery. I loved her but I would've let her go.

Mr. Douthat questions the right to end hopeless pain through suicide. (He also seems to imagine that hopeless pain can only be physical, not psychological.) I think he has never experienced severe long-term pain. It is not a condition to which I would condemn anyone. The right to end life should require meeting certain qualifications, just as the right to drive a car. This is not a flippant comparison. If the State can end life following a trial, an individual should be enabled to end her own life following an examination of the circumstances that prompted the decision.

Years ago terminally ill patients could not direct hospital staff to forego heroic measures to sustain their lives. Today that is an option. Seeing only pain and misery ahead, and seeing clearly, should entitle us to assisted suicide. Like botched abortions before Roe v. Wade, declaring suicide illegal will not prevent botched suicide attempts. Must we condemn people to live without hope, punishing them for seeking release from agony?

We do so, I believe, because we are in thrall to religion. The Constitution may dictate separating the actions of the church from the actions of the State, but religious beliefs that demand proselytizing continue to encroach on the rights of those of us who regard faith as just that—not science, not fact, no obvious and not inured against rejection by those who prefer logic. Some of us see life as an accident and, as we do for our permanently sick pets, we look to death for relief.

Some Good News and Some Bad News

Bridge of the Single Hair is available for pre-order on Amazon (ship date some two to three weeks out), but any bookstore can get you a copy from the distributor. Or you can download an ebook.

He was assistant to the under-secretary to the Assistant Attorney General—something like that. At any rate, far enough removed from the President to ensure that major media would have little interest in the 50^th anniversary of the Freedom Rides in Jackson. Mississippi itself was thrilled to host us, the Governor (racial-history-challenged Haley Barbour) apologetic for our so-called “mistreatment.” Not a whisper about how Mississippi had violated the federal Constitution. White Mississippi still doesn’t think that highly of the Union. It’s not a politic move to bring it up.

State troopers escorted us through the Delta where the bus driver extinguished our reading lights. No sense in giving a Klan sniper the opportunity to take a potshot at a Freedom Rider. We were there to polish the State's image. Parchman, Mississippi’s State Pen, had created a fittingly sententious plaque. They gave us lunch and a tour of Unit 17, which holds the death chamber as well as the maximum-security unit where we were incarcerated. The previous day they'd had an execution scheduled but the condemned man received a last minute stay. The week before they'd gone through with one. It was creepy standing over a table where a man had recently been put to death. One member of our touring group hitched her hip over the table, engrossed in the warden's explanation of the process. Several of us gasped.

The 50^th anniversary held many glorious moments and some low ones. It was embarrassingly pleasant to be asked to autograph my mug shot. Heady to ride in a convoy of six buses through Jackson, escorted by Mississippi State Troopers who held off all traffic as we cruised through red light after red light. Hubris-inciting to note all the signs welcoming us to Jackson and to Mississippi, as if we were visiting dignitaries. As soon as we left the plane, we began to see posters announcing our arrival.

Following a banquet, in a ceremony reminiscent of a university graduation, each of us received a plaque, some one hundred or more clear plastic Greyhound buses, each etched with a name plus our claim to fame: Freedom Rider May 1961. We then perched on a bandstand, several feet above the floor, and had our group photograph taken. No doubt a hundred years from now, assuming mankind still exists, students will puzzle over that photograph, trying to make a connection between our aged faces and the young rebels who challenged federal and state governments. I know when I was young, I thought old people were born old.

We were fed and fed and fed again. Free wine—and not too bad—was given to anyone who said she'd been a Freedom Rider. Black Mississippians hugged as many of us as they could, and said how much they appreciated what we'd done.

Mississippi was, even from this brief description, clearly a very different place in some ways. The hotel, quite nice, hosted black and white guests. While I noticed the service help was overwhelmingly black, nonetheless, in general, black guests appeared to receive the same welcome as white guests. Still, when we drove through the poorer sections of Jackson, the faces looking up at our buses were all dark. We may have helped to de-segregate public spaces, but we didn't do anything, North or South, about employment discrimination, at least not in 1961.

The voting rights that Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman died fighting for caused some despair among politically active Mississippians who moaned that too many people didn't bother to vote. At the same time, we saw a number of successful African American politicians in powerful positions. The chief of police in Jackson is not only black, but a woman. Cracks in a racist infrastructure often appear in the strangest places.

The man Obama sent read the Presidential Proclamation declaring May 24, 2011, “the 50^th anniversary of the Freedom Rides.” We appreciated the President’s validation of our arithmetic. But once again Barack Obama ignores an opportunity to use his bully pulpit to advance understanding or appreciation of progressive politics. Few young Americans know what the Freedom Rides were. In fact, a young man, whose mother had been in SNCC, registering black voters in Mississippi in the 1960s, asked me what on earth the Freedom Rides were! Obama's man assured us he was not going to take credit on behalf of our government for the Civil Rights Movement. Which he then proceeded to do, enumerating the things our federal government had done for us although failing to include the fact that what the government did was all done belatedly and only because the rest of the world featured our plight on its front pages with shocked headlines. Worse, Obama's man swore to us that our government would always be there to see that no American’s rights were ever violated. He tried for stentorian fire, repeating his promise several times a la Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech, but the man from DC didn’t have the voice or the presence. That might not have been accidental. If he’d been more interesting, the New York Times might’ve shown up.

But I would like that "our government is great" bureaucrat to tell Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen the President has ordered assassinated, that our government will never let his rights be violated.

Or let him tell the family of Frederick Jermaine Carter, the young man whose suspicious hanging has been prematurely written off as suicide by Mississippi authorities. Although, according to his mother’s attorney, Carter's body bore signs of a beating, the coroner insisted he wasn’t even bruised. What happened to Frederick Jermaine Carter is not the central issue. The central issue is that part of protecting our rights as American citizens is ensuring that our suspicious deaths aren’t promptly turned into fish wrap for the convenience of those who don't regard us as particularly important.

Maybe Obama's spokesperson should tell the cousin of Emmett Till about our government's dedication to protecting rights. Simeon Wright, cousin of Emmett Till and present when he was kidnapped, recently watched as Congress established the Civil Rights Cold Case Unit and then refused to fund it. Didn’t matter. The FBI investigated Till's murder, found evidence against others still living, and closed the file without making a single indictment. Fifty-six years after his death, Emmett Till's survivors have not seen justice.

Or tell it to Ben Chaney, the brother of James, the young voting rights worker who had the "good luck" to be lynched in Mississippi in the company of two white men. Without their presence in the grave, his name would never have reached the pages of our newspapers, something Ben recently asserted. As it was, several other black civil rights workers in 1964 perished without an investigation. But Chaney’s murderers, including a prominent Mississippian, known to the FBI as well as to local authorities, walk free to this day. Apart from Edgar Ray Killen, not one has served more than six years for that heinous slaughter of three young men.

Or, perhaps the assistant to the under-secretary could tell it to the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have been illegally foreclosed against in the absence of proof of title to the homes they lost, too many of them African Americans. Or to those who were tricked into signing usurious mortgages while bankers reaped obscene profits from investments in spurious mortgage "instruments" by middle-class Americans. Yeah. He could tell those investors as well, investors who have yet to see the real criminals on Wall Street brought before the bar.

We aging Freedom Riders sat in the broiling Mississippi sun and listened to this federally concocted drivel. Many of us—probably most of us—clapped politely.

We visited the Emmett Till memorial, a plaque placed to one side of the crumbling store where in 1955 a young boy committed the crime of winking. The plaque couldn’t be placed on the actual property because the rotting store belongs to one of the jurors who acquitted two of the murderers of Emmett Till. He bought it from one of the killers after acquitting him. (No rights were violated there, eh, Mr. Assistant to the Assistant?) Although many plead for the State to seize and restore the building, it seems clear eminent domain is applicable only when used to sabotage people who hold out against banks and developers. The State appears content to let the store disappear, excusing itself with the erection of a plaque. I’m sure plenty of tourists will make the long trek up to the Delta to view a commemorative sign.

“Emmett Till’s murder,” declared the (white) docent, “was the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement.” He reminded us that Rosa Parks declared, when she was told to give up her seat, she “thought of Emmett Till and couldn’t do it.”

My generation, like Emmett Till close to or in our mid-teens, read about that brutal lynching. Many of us were traumatized to learn what Southern white men were capable of doing. No doubt, black Freedom Riders from Mississippi were not surprised, although equally horrified.

None of us wanted to live in a savage land where a child could be ripped apart by grown men, who then bragged about it.

Many at the conference talked about the black citizens of Mississippi who risked their lives to house, feed, and carry us around. “Those people didn’t have homes up North to go back to,” one speaker noted. “We need to remember those people, to find them and honor them. They are the real heroes of this Movement.”

Many of us would've liked to have seen them at the conference, to have had a chance to ask them for their autographs.

But there were a few moments of uneasiness as our shining armor cracked now and then. I still recall a young freedom fighter who openly expressed horror at having been mistaken for a black man because of his short hair and deep tan.

In a conference meeting, a white man insisted that white Freedom Riders had been treated “worse than black” because we were seen as “race traitors.”

Really? Well, I don't think history and experience document the claim. But why should blacks and whites compete for the honor of having had things worse? That would be a losing competition for the whites, I’d say, since we're behind by a couple of hundred years of vicious oppression.

Another Freedom Rider, at the time of the Rides a pretty pale girl, told a story of being helped from the bus by a Southern cop. He smiled at her and said, “Little girl, we’re not going to let anything bad happen to you.” But then he realized she was a Freedom Rider and he recoiled. “When he held his hand out to me,” she cooed, “his kindness came through and we saw a very different person from the one we had imagined. He was just a Southern white gentleman giving his hand to a lady.”

She seemed to have forgotten that precisely this breed of chivalry was responsible for the flaying of Emmett Till.

Worst of all, fifty years after the Freedom Rides, black people in the Mississippi Delta still keep their heads down and Emmett Till is a cipher to the white community, although vivid in the memories of African Americans. Lynching remains an arrow, ready to be taken from white Mississippi’s quiver. Black prisoners in particular know it.

But I am thrilled to have seen so many young people who came from all over the country, black and white, to talk about how to carry forward the tradition of resistance they believe we started.

We didn’t, of course. We were links in a chain reaching backward for centuries. Now we hope Americans come forward once more, having heard well the false notes in political speeches, and having the courage to denounce the poor excuses for human beings that litter our political landscape. The time for a new freedom movement is now. Believe it. Congress just extended the Patriot Act.