Zombie Patriots and other musings [was: Re: (No Subject)]

[John Kelsey]

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

--John Kelsey, kelsey.j at ix.netcom.com
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