Euthanasia3

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Euthanasia

    There is a thin line between live and death. The normal tendency of
any human being, at least in our culture, is to preserve its life.
This is how this society evolves. At first sight, nobody can imagine
how some people make the decision to put an end to their live. In our
culture, we almost venerate life and reject, in some aspects, death.
The most valuable thing that any person has is to be alive and to
have the opportunity to wake up and see a new day. Any individual
grows up and works in order to have a better quality of life, but in
order to live we need to have health first. When our environment is
interrupted by anything unsuspected, we can drastically make
decisions that will affect our destiny. Situations such as a terminal
and incurable illness, can be the precursors that lead any human
being to the resolution of taking the “easy” and painless
way to evade their situation.
    Etymologically speaking, euthanasia means good death, but maybe that
does not means to take the destiny of our life in our own hands.
Nowadays that meaning has turned into something different. Euthanasia
means to end someone’s life who is suffering and having a
miserable life because of an incurable or terminal illness. In
adition it is called a homicide for compassion. How can we say that
a homicide can be done with good intensions and it can be an act of
love and empathy?

    
Sue Rodriguez, a mother in her early thirties, died slowly of Lou
Gehrig's disease. She lived for several years with the knowledge that
her muscles would, one by one, waste away until the day came when,
fully conscious, she would choke to death. She begged the Courts to
reassure her that a doctor would be allowed to assist her in choosing
the moment of death. They refused. She lived on in terror, helped
eventually by a doctor who, in February 1994, covertly broke the law
to help her die in peace. A law on assisted suicide with rigorous
safeguards could have saved her the nightmare during those months
before her death, given her the confidence to carry on - with the
reassurance that when it got too bad she could rely on a
compassionate doctor to follow her wishes at the end. Exit is pledged
to support research for drafting the most thorough, yet feasible,
assisted suicide Bill yet presented to Parliament. Your support will
make it happen. Basically, euthanasia is intimately related to our
faith in God (Docker, 2000). When adversity comes to your life you
can feel lonely and abandoned. It is in that specific moment you can
prove to yourself and to the rest of the world what are you made of.
I know that it is easy to say “We should accept and take with
humility the life that God have for us”. It would be very hard
and sad to know that you will be confined to a terminal illness that
will consume your essence and life. As human beings, we tend to be
afraid to new experiences, no matter if they seemed to be for good.
When we loose the command of our life we can feel misplaced as Sue
did. It is hard to found the good side of our problem or situation,
even a small one. We have to be brave for the people that is around
you because in most of the cases they do not suffer the physical pain
but they suffer the emotional one.

    
According to Breitbart et al. (2004) “dying patients require
attention to physical, emotional, and psychological needs”.
This is an important fact that implies the importance to have someone
beloved at your side. Most terminally ill people are left alone with
their suffering. It is important to count with the support of the
family and friends. At least, a terminally ill person can fight
against everything, if it has something that brings hope and
significance to his or her life. Those motivations can help a patient
in a positive way over a patient that does not have any. In addition,
Siegel and Schrimshaw (2002) found that nearly all of their
participants reported that religious and/or spiritual beliefs and
practices were an important coping resource for those who were dying
from HIV/AIDS. They found that religion provided a way to ease the
emotional burden of the illness, allowed for the relinquishment of
control over to God, facilitated meaning and acceptance of the
illness, and slowed the progression of the illness. They also found
that it (a) relieved the fear of death and uncertainty of the
afterlife and (b) facilitated the self-acceptance and reduced
self-blame. As mentioned earlier our faith, is the stronger argument
when a person decides to put end to his/her life. God provides to us
the confidence that things would be better, no matter if is in this
or in the other life. Maybe we can think that our future is out of
our control. In a situation like that, we can hope that everything
has a purpose and if He gives to us any assignment we should take it
and make it the better possible, no matter the difficult that can
result.

    
Another case presented by Docker (1996-2000) stated the story of a
young woman called Karen Ann Quinlan:

Karen collapsed on April 15th, 1975. She was twenty-one years old.
Within hours, she entered a coma from which she could never recover.
Her parents, staunch Roman Catholics, knew their daughter would not
want to be kept alive by extraordinary means. A year later, as Karen
lay in a "persistent vegetative state," the courts finally
allowed her treatment to be stopped; but artificial feeding was
continued and she was maintained as a living corpse until June 1985,
when she eventually died of pneumonia. Her case spurred thousands of
letters of sympathy and fuelled the "right to die"
movement. How many people need to die degrading deaths before society
learns a little humanity? Exit is committed to research and teaching
in these difficult areas. Help us to help you, and all those who
would seek die with dignity and give you their heartfelt thanks.

In contrast to Sue’s story, in this situation the young lady
was in a coma, and she was incapable to decide her destiny. What we
can one do if someone elses life is in our hands. How can we decide
if a person should live in suffering or not? It should be the hardest
decision a person should take. I can not imagine the pain and agony
that those parents experienced. In this case, it was an option to let
that girl died? Maybe she was in coma, but if she was enabled to
known everything that happened. I think that those things are the
ones that make euthanasia a controversial theme. There are no middle
terms in here. Is the life, of someone that needs help, that we have
in discussion. Should we respect the decision of a person, leaving
out our faith? After all it is not our life. We are not suffering
knowing that your days are counted to end.

    
Let’s talk about the persons that are more in contact with the
ill patients, the doctors. Any physician traditionally takes the
Hippocratic Oath before it obtains its diploma. The oath is
pertaining to the ethical practice of medicine. It is widely believed
that the oath was written by Hippocrates,
the father of medicine, in  the4th century BC, or by one of his students. In
such oath a doctor swears to the gods and goodness to be responsible
and to preserve human life. In addition to that, they will never give 
a deadly drug to anybody who asked for it. According to the oath, a
physician can not take the decision of ends a patient life. They are
the ones that should try at any instance to save a person life. In
the moment that a physician offers euthanasia as an option to a
patient is breaking with his/her word. Jack
Kevorkian is a doctor called as “Dr Death”.
He offers death counseling to those persons with a terminal illness.
He helps to die around 130 people before he was sentenced ten to
twenty-five years in prison. The situation for him took a surprising
ending when he was diagnosed with hepatitis C. He asks for the same
services that he gave in one time.

    
As we can see euthanasia can be seen through different perspectives:
as a patient or as the person with the responsibility of someone else
life. It is important to evaluate our life and convictions. A
person’s life after all is the most important thing that we
have. We should take care of our mind and body in a responsible way.
Love your life even when you can find anything good to it. Do not let
the bad moments decides your future in this world. Anything has a
solution as well as your life. Fight for you and for one that you
love.

References:

Docker, C. (1996-2000).
http://www.euthanasia.cc/cases.html#sr

Reiner S. (Fall 200). Religious and Spiritual Beliefs: An Avenue
to Explore End-of-Life Issues. ADUlTSPAN/owraa/
VoL 6 No. 2

http://www.rsrevision.com/Alevel/ethics/euthanasia/cases.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath

Obama

Barack Obama

    The future of the United States has
been decided during this year elections. In this year in specific
there where some historical facts that will be latent in the history
of the entire world. First of all in the primaries for the Democratic
Party one of the candidates was a white women and the other was a
black man. The interest in this election was so big that the federal
government gave a unique opportunity to participate in the primaries.
The participants Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton make a good
campaign in the island and they even talk in Spanish in their
political conventions. Finally the black man takes out the victory. I
don’t want to sound racist but we have to accept that in the
United State the discrimination about the ethnicities and race are
huge, but it is very interesting that people pick up a black man over
a white woman. This indicates that we are living a change because the
citizens elect a candidate not for his race or gender but for his
abilities and intelligence. That is not all; Obama won the elections
over the republican candidate John McKaine and for the next year he
will be in front of one of the most powerful nations in the entire
world.

    Barack Obama represents hope for the
people in and out of the U.S. He represents a positive change that
the situation that we are living right now can change in order to
have a better future. The other nations trust in him, to the point
that Fidel Castro declares to TIME that he will be able to meet, and
he expects that the new government will be one pacifist and without
war. These same expectations are the ones that people have. He
demands change in his campaign and know he has the responsibility to
make it happen. He has the responsibility to make a good job and
demonstrate that no matter were you from or of what color or gender
you are, the most important thing is your intellect and your ability
to take the right choices.

    I believe that he will be a good
president. I hope that he would be the leader of all of the people of
different ethnicities. He represent the black, white, Asian, Latinos
and all of the other people that represents the United States. I
think that he can be able to transcend the political and social
barriers. He is capable to run a country likes United States and this
is a unique opportunity to make a change in the world, leaving behind
the separations and confrontations and uniting the world together.

The Economic Divide3

The Economic Divide

    
Technology has come to our lives with out a turning point. It rules
every aspect of our society including the way that our countries are
directed. With its introduction in the United
Sates, the U.S. Department of Commerce adopted the goal of providing
universal telecommunication and Internet
access. In 1997, the president Bill Clinton declared a goal of wiring
every home by the year 2007 (Reiser, Wallin & Wilson, 2006).
Nevertheless, while some societies are growing exponentially some has
been left out. These differences, in very few cases are small and
untraceable, but in other cases the differences are huge and seemed
at fist sight. Differences that come from the economic area and that
affects directly, positive or negatively, the lifestyles of the
citizens. The reality is that the people that live in those places
like Africa or Haiti are the ones that are directly affected with the
development of technology.

    
Technology encloses the telecommunication media, home artifacts,
among others. Without any doubt the greatest invention of all times
has been the invention of the computer and the internet. The internet
permits us to search information about anything, all that you can
imagine. Nowadays we are able to look up for our family members and
friends; we can even make friends and know people from other places
with different cultures and languages. It is amazing how this tool
has become a virtual socializing agent; we do not need to be in the
same place any more as other people in order to know someone new. It
is sad and lamentable that the same aspects that can be good for
someone can be prejudicial for someone else. Some of us are in total
contact with the latest news, but in contrast there are people that
are enclosed in their own world because they are restricted by their
resources.

    
Dasgupta, Lall & Weeler (2000) explains that although futurists
regularly extol the Internet's potential benefits for poor countries,
skepticism is common among development researchers. The benefits of
the internet implantation in those countries can be favorable in
certain way to their progress, just as we do. People from these
nations can obtain a better education and an educated country has
better opportunities to develop. The difficult aspect resides in how
they are going to carry out this implantation. In these countries the
economic resources are limited and also the physical environment is
not the best. Some of these places are huge in territory and the
people live spread around the country. The curious thing is that some
of these places are rich in natural resources such as Africa that is
abundant in metals and precious stones. That is because the earnings
are from the people that already have money and the technology. As we
can imagine these persons are not the majority and the rest of the
population are the ones left out of the world development,
economically and technologically.

With the advent of technology the economic divide has been increased.
Societies with the best and newest discoveries are ahead in the world
scenario. Science research has been promoted by the governments in
order to obtain leadership and power that ultimately will give them
the best technology to dominate and influence other countries. The
division can be product of many sources, but the final result will be
the same, a division between groups as a result of the economy. We
now live in a material society and we are focused in the money that
will give us a respectful, desired and high position in the group.

    
In addition to the economic divide, that consists of a person or
group of the population does not have the capital to acquire
technology such as a computer, Nielsen (2006) introduces two more
stages for a digital divide. These stages are the usability and
empowerment divide. The first one refers to the fact that one person
has the money to have a computer and internet but they do not know
how to use it. This is a big problem for people that does not have an
education in this technology or just because it is impossible for
them to understand because they did not have the fundamental literacy
skills, such as writing and reading. Nielson argues that the
industries prefer to direct the technology to youths and left out, in
a certain way, the elderly people. The elderly people can have more
capital than the young ones but them does not represent the future in
technology. The elderly are not a priority, in this society this
population has been discriminated because people think that they are
useless for their age. The second stage, the empowerment divide, is
when you can posses the capital to buy technology and you know how to
use it. The divide reside when the person have a widely knowledge but
do not use it at it maximum level.

    
The two stages explained by Nielsen (2006), the usability and
empowerment divide are a subdivision of the economic divide. If
someone is not a literate person maybe it can be a result of the
monetary situation of their home or social environment. For the other
part the elderly people are affected and forget in this development
because they are not considered important in the economic process.
This idea is directly proportional to the economy. In the
capitalistic society the citizens that are important are those that
can contribute to the country with their work and the ones that can
consume the most. For the empowerment divide the connection with
economy is harder to see. The fact that we become more and more
dependent of technology when we have it is the result of the economy
power behind technology. With more money there is more technology
that we can get, and vice versa. The ability to
access and use technology effectively will be the key to economic
success for both individuals and communities. Individuals must learn
to use this new technology to have any chance of being successful in
the emerging knowledge economy (Reiser, Wallin & Wilson, 2006).

    
Reiser, Wallin & Wilson (2006) carried out
a study in North Carolina and it showed that black, rural, and female
respondents were significantly less likely to have home computers
than white, urban, male respondents. Respondents with higher incomes
and more education were more likely to have home computers. These
results demonstrate the importance of education among the different
social ethnicities. Education is the key of successful in this era,
without education there are fewer opportunities to be in a good
economically position. Nowadays is basically necessary to be a
multidisciplinary student we should learn and study about diverse
subjects because those can be the better tool that we can have for
the future. With the fast development of technology our lifestyles
are exposed to a continually change and we should be able to work in
those multifaceted areas in order to be successful.

    
As we can see the economy dictates every aspect, directly or
indirectly, of our lives. In this case the economy affects the way in
which people communicates including the politicians of the powerful
countries. These persons are the ones that take control in the
decisions of the other people that depend on their resolutions. There
are people that do not think that economy is the agent that rules our
societies, but it is. The most important aspect is that it is the
main responsible of the digital divide. The crude reality is that if
someone does not have money, they will not have the possibility to
have technology and to progress in this material world. It is sad
that we can not have another option because every time technology is
changing and we have should goes in the same direction otherwise we
will be in disadvantage. Obviously there are people that do not have
other option and they are enclosed in a technology free society.

References:

-Reiser
C., Wallin J. & Wilson K.; 2006;Social
Stratification and the Digital Divide

-Dasgupta
S., Lall S. & Weeler D.; (2000); Policy Reform, Economic Growth,
and the Digital Divide: An Econometric Analysis; Development Research
Group World Bank

-Nielsen
J., (2006); Digital Divide: The Three Stages;
file:///G:/Digital%20Divide/digital-divide.html