Dr. Kevorkian made news a few years back for assisting people in committing suicide. As Jerry Seinfeld so aptly put it “Don’t these people have access to tall buildings?”
Helping someone kill themselves is illegal but it’s okay if we’re talking about an old sick dog. We keep people alive to make them suffer but we help animals to commit suicide because they don’t have opposable thumbs. Being humane to humans sounds like the right thing to do, but not in the ears of the law. You can commit suicide by drinking yourself to a slow and painful death but shooting yourself in the head, which is fairly short and painless, is against the rules.
If a person who kills is a murderer and one who kills many is a serial killer, what do you call a person who kills tens of thousands? They are a conqueror or a liberator. In war, killing is fine even if the other person doesn’t want to commit suicide via your gun. And murder is so wrong in our society that if you murder someone, the state will murder you right back. Assaulting someone on the street will get you five years in prison, but that same act while on skates will get you five minutes in the penalty box. And fighting in the squared circle might bring you a really nice belt, millions of dollars in endorsements and dates with Playboy Playmates.
The whole world doesn’t make sense and it’s killing me. Gambling is illegal unless it’s a government lottery or an Indian casino but try to play poker in your basement with your high school buddies or put money on a Lakers game and you don’t pass go or collect $200; you go directly to jail.
My parents didn’t want me fighting with my brother so they’d hit me to keep me from hitting him. This type of bass ackwards thinking is what probably drove the “Kill All Violence” campaign New York City ran a few years back. They beat violence senseless and left it bleeding and unconscious in the gutter. And in Manhattan, your dog can pee in the park in plain view but try that same maneuver next to him and you get tickets for public urination, indecent exposure and in some cases, impersonating a man.
Bumping another car on the highway will cost you a lot of money and make your insurance go up but that type of driving is necessary to win NASCAR’s Nextel Cup. We teach our kids to be polite and not push and shove until someone cuts in front of us at the post office on April 15th or leaving Yankee Stadium after a big game; these are the same people we had been high-fiving in the stands ten minutes earlier. We let them in front of us in line at Christmas time, we are holy to them in church on Sunday but we curse them when they don’t hold the door for us while leaving. And God help them if they park too close and hit our door. Matthew 17:24 says “Do-ith onto others before they do-ith on to you.” Maybe I can beat them to the car.
