in the meantime

Many people have heard by now of Senator Edward Kennedy's malignant brain tumor (if you want to know more about the actual science of it, check out this article from the Dana Foundation, where my brother is managing editor) and imminent retirement.

Coverage of this story has inadvertently illustrated a couple of things about our current cultural moment that make me sad for reasons that have nothing to do with my sympathy for those who must deal with their own or a loved one's terminal illness.

First, I've seen grave predictions from medical professionals and others that, basically, Senator Kennedy's time on Earth is now limited. NEWS FLASH: He's going to die.

But you and I? Clearly we are going to live forever.

Many cultures have reached an equilibrium on this point that continues to elude mainstream U.S. culture - they understand death as a natural and inevitable part of life. Of course it's never easy for anyone to lose a loved one, much less watch them endure the pain and suffering prolonged illness may bring. But they don't add to that misery the shock and disbelief that seem to be a part of our culture's usual reactions to news of illness and death. Not everyone in the world approaches life with the assumption that we've all been granted the inalienable right to a particular idea of physical and mental normalcy for an infinite number of years.

(Of course, not every single U.S. American makes that assumption either. Please understand that I'm generalizing here).

How might you live your life differently if you really believed you and the people you love will die, maybe soon? And if everyone who is relatively healthy thought of themselves as, to quote someone who came to my organization last year to discuss working with students with disabilities, "temporarily abled" instead of "normal"?

...

I'm tempted to leave it at that, instead of jumping topics to the other thing in the media coverage of Kennedy's illness that's bugging me... but I found it kind of depressingly fascinating, and this is my blog after all, so I get to write about what I'm thinking about. Which as you may have inferred is pretty much all over the map most of the time. So...

This line in the Washington Post story today caught my eye: "The Senate opened debate on paying for another year of the Iraq war without the Massachusetts Democrat's customary roar of outrage."

I read that sentence as: We are so bored with and uninterested in the political process and especially with the war in Iraq that we may as well add debates about it to Robert's Rules of Order. "As the subject is opened to debate it shall be necessary, first, that the Senator from Massachusetts shall offer a roar of outrage.

"Second, that the issue be meagerly debated before members proceed to their respective offices to offer meaningless 10-second sound bites to assorted media; and third, that funding be approved lest members of the assembly be forced to actually face and put a stop to the unending violence and meaningless destruction. Members of the assembly shall repeat the above steps as needed one or multiple times per year/decade/century."

(Hey look, these two topics are actually quite connected. I actually wasn't thinking of it that way when I started to write this. Which is why I like writing a blog.)

We will all die someday. That doesn't mean we should ever let ourselves be comfortable with the taking of lives, no matter how far away or impoverished or militantly Islamic they are. Wendell Berry said that "to treat life as anything less than precious is to give up on it." I'm pretty sure that he wasn't talking about just his or yours or mine.