Storytime Tapestry Newsletter

The newsletter devoted to spreading love and cultural awareness around the world.

Beyond The Mirror – A Bill Allin Column

Dec 15, 2006

Do We Have A Right to Destroy Our Bodies?
by Bill Allin

Generally speaking, western society believes that committing suicide is wrong, but destroying your body slowly through harmful lifestyle habits is quite OK.

Both are suicidal, intentionally or otherwise, they just differ in the time it takes for the killing act to take effect. Time is the deciding factor in whether killing yourself is morally and (in some jurisdictions) legally wrong or socially acceptable (at least accepted).

Can time really make something that is wrong into something that is right, or at least permissible? Isn’t that hypocrisy? It’s wrong if you kill yourself quickly, but acceptable if you do it slowly?

Very few lives have been saved because car drivers or passengers were not wearing seatbelts. Yet when many jurisdictions enacted laws requiring seat belts to be used at all times in vehicles, injuries and deaths were decimated.

We were not given any choice about wearing seat belts. The lawmakers set aside arguments that wearing seatbelts was a matter of freedom of choice and decided in favour of saving lives.

True, many of the lives that have been saved by people wearing seatbelts were involved as victims in drunk driving collisions. There’s a law against that too.

We have no laws against smoking cigarettes or against manufacturing them or selling them (though there are some restrictions on the last). A list of diseases and organ failures that are totally or partially caused by tobacco smoke is shocking. There are many poisons in cigarettes, among them hydrogen cyanide (used in gas chambers), arsenic, formaldehyde, DDT, carbon monoxide, acetone and mercury.

Scientists around the world are enraged at how governments continue to allow industries and vehicles to pollute the air with greenhouse gases that cause global warming. Despite the fact that the few countries that have taken air pollution seriously have thriving economies with lower unemployment than before "green" solutions were put into effect, most industrialized countries continue to pollute at an alarming rate.

What gases are put into the air that cause the greenhouse effect? They are too numerous to list because there are around half a million of them. Start with the ones in cigarette smoke.

Where are the wee small voices crying that greenhouse gases are harming our health? It’s common knowledge that the number of range of health problems today far outnumbers that when we were children. Greenhouse gases are poisoning our bodies, not just causing the air temperature to rise and the weather to go wonky.

If we poison our bodies voluntarily by an unhealthy lifestyle, even if it kills us, this is somehow socially acceptable. If corporations poison us voluntarily through air pollution, even if it kills us or ruins our health, this is somehow socially acceptable. The corporations, after all, were only making products to sell to us. Doesn’t that mean that we poison ourselves indirectly through industrial pollution?

It’s time for us to speak up, to make noise that politicians will hear. We need to write to our political representatives, at all levels. We need to write letters to the editors of our newspapers. We need to call in to phone-in radio programs.

We need to talk about the subject with our friends, our neighbours, our families. The more people talk, the more likely some will eventually influence politicians to make the necessary changes. Remember, our friends talk to other friends, who talk to still more. By networking, thousands discuss the same message within days.

If we accept that wearing a seatbelt is OK because it might prevent our death or the death of someone in our vehicle in the event of a collision, then we had better get on the ball and do something about voluntary long-term self-destruction.

Someone is killing you. Or harming your health. Maybe even shortening your life.

Slowly.