Life No Longer Sacred
Paul Socken in his op-ed (“When Did the Elderly Like Me Become Disposable?” April 30) is asking a good question. Have we actually reached the point where the value of a human life, regardless of age, has become a mathematical rather than an ethical question? The answer increasingly is becoming yes.
How did this happen? Socken answers that well when he says that when we dropped the Judeo-Christian morality system, we replaced it with the secular-narcissistic I can do whatever I want system. A developing baby became converted into a choice. If I didn’t want it, termination became the choice. It’s now becoming acceptable to abort right up to, and even after, birth. Life, once sacred, now is just another decision that has to be made devoid of any ethical considerations.
In this milieu we now confront the difficult decisions about the elderly, specifically are they disposable, and increasingly the answer is yes. In other words, the elderly are about to become yet one more choice to be made by a society which is losing its moral compass and whose culture is becoming increasingly crass.
Not too long ago there were bright red lines between right and wrong, evil and good, between the decent and the depraved. A baby’s life was sacred as was the life of the elderly, and every stage in between. That is increasingly no longer the case.
Steve Heitner | Port Jefferson Station, New York
