At 02:07 PM 12/11/03 -0500, Trei, Peter wrote:

It's worth noting that despite over a decade of this rhetoric, not a single terminally ill American has done this, so far as I am aware.

Well, I think for most terminal illnesses, by the time it's obvious you're really not going to live much longer, you're pretty damned sick. And until then, you'd probably like to make some personal use of what days or weeks you have left doing something like talking to your kids, praying, composing that last piece of music, etc., rather than blowing random strangers up to make some political point. (Wouldn't it be a hell of a depressing statement about yourself, if you really believed that the most valuable use of the last hours of your life of which you were capable would involve strapping some dynamite to yourself and taking out a busload of random strangers?) Along with that, most people care about either the afterlife form of immortality, or at least the reputation/legacy form of immortality. Even if you don't worry about lakes of fire and red guys with pitchforks, you might prefer not to have your family and friends humiliated and ashamed at the mention of your name. ("Oh my God! That was *your* son? How do you live with that?")

The *only* even vaguely simlar cases I'm aware of are in India and Sri Lanka, where young Hindu widows (who, in traditional Hindu society have very dim prospects for a happy life) are recruited as suicide bombers by the Tamil Tigers. I think Rajiv Ghandi's assassin was such a woman.

So there, the women are still healthy enough to do something, and doing the suicide bombing thing won't leave behind a legacy of relatives who change their names to avoid being associated with you.

Peter Trei

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