Dedicated to JB. Sadly missed. The UK needed and needs people with your brainpower, commitment, open-mindedness and understanding. And intelligence. And the ability to get into people's faces with your arguments, particularly the chronic conservatives and the British nationalists. To die at a relatively young age as you did .... tragic (and I never use that word lightly).
I have said goodbye to my readers before. This time it is definite. There will be no return. Given that the world was already moving in the wrong direction and the movement in that direction has rapidly accelerated in recent months .... and given the limited scope of my readership and my desire to get people to look at the issues in detail rather than skimming over the top .... Let's say we are going nowhere with this. I have said all that I think needs saying. If people in the world are stupid enough to want to bow down to the Caliph of the Islamic State ("agree with me or I will have your head chopped off") or King Rupert of Adelaide ("everyone ought to be a patriot, now what nationality am I now and where is my actual fiefdom, and ooh, I am not a national of that country but does anyone care or take notice?") .....
There is plenty of relevant material on this blog where we ought to be headed and why we got in the mess in the first place. Study it at leisure and think how you can plan to make the future better. I would recommend also an organisation called Avaaz which continues to agitate worldwide for a lot of worthwhile causes.
Anyway this is post number 512. 2 to the power 9 - that pleases the arithmetician in my brain (in my soul? Fine - please locate where the soul lies in my anatomy and I will accept the concept. It is as silly as telling people to look in their heart - in my case they will find that the plumbing changed in 2008. One only wishes that the way of running the world economy had changed in 2008, but, as stated above, the world has been moving in the wrong direction for a long time. Where madness prevails give the keys of the asylum back to the lunatics, or in the case of the UKIP/EXP give the keys to the new set of lunatics).
Germany is pretty quiet at the moment. There are a few stories of more idiots heading off to serve the Caliph of the Islamic State, a few about some of them coming back disillusioned, but that is not front page stuff any more. Even the stories of a few going to fight for the Kurds came and went.
The economy is chugging along. Unemployment is still far too high, but does anyone notice? Any currency crisis stories have faded into the mist. In fact the big story this week is whether Germany should make euthanasia more easily available.
Frankly I do not see this as a question that needs answering. Life as such has to have some quality, some purpose, some enjoyment. Lying in a terminally ill state offers any of these? Well if there were hope of a miracle cure?
Outside the realms of the mythical religious wheeler-dealers ("liars" might be an appropriate word) there is precious very little of that. Your chance of winning the big prize in the lottery is actually higher than finding this miracle cure. And for how much longer do you want to live anyway, frail and surviving purely for the sake of survival. Ugh!
Old age is not enjoyable. Losing a lot of your faculties is not enjoyable. Fighting to keep yourself together tends eventually to be a losing battle. It is one thing to lose your life at a relatively young age and there is so much you could still do, it is another entirely when you have done everything that there is to do and you are in a state of permanent decline. In my opinion, keeping the terminally ill alive for the sake of survival itself amounts to sadism.
Of course for the relatives it is not easy. I know that from experience. I was heartbroken when my father died, and unhappy but resigned when my mother died 12 years later. But there was an inevitability in both cases and it was better not to see them suffer (my mother's death was sudden, my father's scarcely three days after falling ill for the last time). Their memories and the good times together remain with me, and I shall always be thankful for whom they were and what they did for me.
But I also want to remember them as healthy and strong and purposeful and in the prime of life. After a certain point you can no longer have that, nor can it be restored with some magic elixir.
In my own case my life now is nowt like as good as it was in the 2 best years of my life (actually 27 months between September 1994 and November 1996 inclusive). But my faculties are still mainly intact, and someone loves me beyond comprehension, so .... But when things decline to the point when this is no longer the case I hope that she will understand and let me go. I too want to be remembered as healthy and strong .... and intellectually sharp and combative.
I am animal, not vegetable, and I do not wish at any point to turn into the latter. So with a polite smile you whisper goodbye and disappear into the great void. An endless, peaceful sleep. Which sounds a pleasant thought - in fact a far more pleasant thought than the awful state into which the world has currently descended!
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