Current mood:

aggravated

"I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
I gave myself a massive stress headache last night just generally worrying so I took a couple of paracetamol and went for a lie down at about 8 o'clock. My headache has gone now but I can't quite get back to sleep so I'm going to talk about organ donations, idiots on the internet and why sex & death are necessarily linked.

I'm pleased to see Prime Minister Gordon Brown has approved an opt-out system of organ donation. This is something I can only see as a good thing if only because it will save hundreds more lives, it'll be much more efficient than the current opt-in system which results in a chronic shortage of organs either from lack of people with donor cards or donors with ridiculous families vetoing the wishes of the donor and denying the organs to be used. The system already works in Spain with a high success rate!

Mind you, I am perhaps biased because its entirely possible that in some point in the future I'll be on the receiving end of someone else's liver or lungs (although, touch-wood it's not for a long time until it gets to such an advanced state of failure) and Brown's motives may have something to do with the fact that his son Fraser has the same disease as I. The thing is, unlike, say, my belief that we should be investing in Nuclear Energy rather than wind-farms for our electricity which I can understand the alternate viewpoint, it seems to me that the only people complaining about this would be Jehovah's Witnesses, but can still opt-out.

However much to my utter despair, I'm wrong. Judging from the BBC Have Your Say debate, most people posting are opposed to the idea. I've often laughed at the sheer idiocy of things posted to the Have Your Say forums - most notably the debate about using unfertilised human-animal hybrid embryos for experiments and one overly panicked poster claimed, in all seriousness, this was what had "Caused Atlantis to Sink". Indeed the moronic comments on there has not escaped the attention of the BBC itself, with Humphrey Lyttelton of Radio 4's I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue quipping that it was "A free an open debate to air a wide range of bigotry".

But Seriously... SERIOUSLY! Here are a few selections from the debate

I want to say that this opinion is an exception, however unfortunately more often than not it's the rule. "Makes me want to rip up my donor card": what a fucking cunt this person is. Seriously, they'd do that just to make a pissy political point that they don't vote Labour? Jesus fucking wept.


Oh for fuck's sake! You know, I suspect 'Doctor' Bob isn't a real doctor at all...


Ever heard of the Hippocratic Oath, dickhead? It's still in use, believe it or not!


Praise for the Spanish system is at the top of the page! LERN REEDING COMPREHENSHUN PLZ!


When in doubt, revert to mindless bigotry. That just solves everything doesn't it!


Oh just fuck off, will you?

Fortunately there are some comments which are not staggeringly idiotic like the above and do give me back some faith in humanity.


Get out of here with your crazy Earth 'Logic' will you? Rational Debate is clearly frowned upon here!


And you! We enjoy our histrionics and not seeing the wood for the trees!


Amen!

The counter arguments, it would seem, are based on the idea that an opt-out system some how erodes your civil liberties. First of all - what? Sorry, what? Did you not understand that you CAN OPT OUT IF YOU WANT TO! Gangs of storm troopers will NOT be forcefully coming into your homes and ripping out your kidneys with a tyre iron! You will NOT be refused treatment at a hospital because you opt-out! This will NOT make you a second-class citizen! DON'T FUCKING PANIC! All this will do is allow more access to organs for those who need it. The current system, as I said above, is flawed as there is not enough donors - the main reasons being is that filling out a form is something that will eternally be done 'tomorrow' for many and then they get hit by a bus or selfish family members vetoing the use of their loved one's organs to help another. Another objection is that doctors may bump off one patient to save another, this will NOT happen, not in the UK anyway as ALL doctors are required to swear an oath by the British Medical Association that they will do whatever they can to save the life of any of their patients: This does NOT include killing them, surprisingly!

The objections are based more on ignorance than anything else.

However, there could be a cultural reason why there is such opposition to the idea. Death is the last great taboo which cannot be realistically censored and it still remains shocking. Death has shocked and continues to do so and until science allows us to live forever will continue to shock (Although I imagine death will become an even bigger taboo if we can live forever). "Death”, in its truest sense, means a collapse: an end to structure, a falling-away of the patterns that keep us alive and moving around, the DNA and the complicated biology. Not a thing at all, just the state of something reverting to random matter. This is perhaps why there is such opposition to the idea, that instead of dying the physical organs will continue to go on working leads us to suspect that this isn't a death at all, it's a half-death, a non-existence. A halfway Limbo between dead and not dead. Perhaps this is more shocking than death itself?

Traditional Goths dressed themselves up like corpses for the same reason Punks wore swastikas and Hippies had indiscriminate sex: because it shocks people, but not to the extent that is gratuitously offensive. Whether we accept it or not there is also a romantically sexy link to sex and death, marriages are supposed to last "Till death do us part", sex, death and taboo go hand in hand for the same reason soft drugs lead to harder ones. No culture without a taboo of death would think of making blood-drinking sexy in the same way smoking cannabis doesn't lead to smoking crack without a drug dealer asking "Hey, have you tried...?" a few times. They're both things we're not supposed to touch and they're both generally sold by the same people. The most obvious example of sex and death going together is in Neil Gaiman's The Sandman where the physical personification of Death is not as a dark grim reaper but a teenage Goth-Girl-Next-Door sex-symbol. Death is a sexy taboo.

Suffering, however, has no such connotations of sex that death does. There is nothing taboo or sexy about suffering, suffering is something we should try to eased, but it lacks the punch the final irreversible lurch into death does. Do you know what we need? I think we need a scare like something The Netherlands's De Grote Donorshow to be shown here just to highlight the problem of chronic organ shortage. When I first heard about a TV show which was going to let the audience vote on who receives a kidney from a terminally ill woman I had difficulty justifying why I believed it was wrong, our ideas of biopolitics, our cultural obsesses about what death 'is': perhaps the idea of playing God is more abhorrent in a universe without a God?

I'm angered by the sheer astronomical levels of ignorance in the comments above, they at least do have a cultural founding in a society secretly obsessed with death. That and the Daily Mail reading Little Englander mentality of complain at ANYTHING a government does, simply because you can regardless of whether it's a good idea or not. If we actually sit down and consider what an Opt-Out system of organ donation would actually mean, it can only be a good thing. Bloody hell!