Houston. -- John Updike in one of his novels has one of his characters say, "Once you let death into the house, it leaves its bloody footprints all over."
Death comes to us all. It beckons us to an unfathomable mystery to which we must surrender or to the vast abyss of the nothingness from which we come. In either case, death is never pretty or welcome (except for some truly great saints). Death is mostly painful, demeaning and humiliating. We are helpless before it. It is the last enemy because it takes us away from all whom we love and cherish, never to see them again in our lifetime. It is terribly final and horrendous. To deliberately inflict it on another is one of the most grievous things we can do. Death is the last enemy of life because it cuts us radically off from all we love, know and care for. All through life, we struggle heroically against death.
That is why death is like a cancer: It communicates itself to everything, once we willingly permit it to enter our lives. We can't stop it. The only solution to death in life is complete nonviolence, an utter and unconditional refusal to all form of death no matter how justified we may think it to be. Death begets death as dog begets dog. Once admitted for whatever purpose, it infects all that we do, all that we are, all that we touch. We must, as it were, absorb all hurt within ourselves and refuse to pass on hatred, revenge, violence and finally death (all these are the footprints of death). Only in this way can we put death to death within ourselves.
The trouble is that we are all selective killers. We permit death to enter our lives for a variety of, seemingly, rational reasons: self-defense, justified war, capital punishment, abortion and finally to escape the horrible suffering of our end: euthanasia as has now been passed by the initiative in Oregon.
Each case, taken by itself, seems reasonable enough. What more reasonable thing to do than to defend ourselves and those whom we love by an act of self-defense, even to the death of the unjust aggressor? What more reasonable thing to do than end the pain of an incurably terminal patient? The trouble with this reasoning is that we become successors and prolongers of death.
We teach our children by what we do, not by what we say. What we do in killing is to show the young that death works; that death is sometimes necessary, even good; that death and violence may be used in a good cause; that death is just retribution to those who caused death, etc. Unfortunately we prolong and accentuate what we hate -- death, our last enemy -- by the very thing we do -- kill -- and so we are caught up in a never-ending spiral of death and violence which we help to maintain and spread by teaching the young that sometimes death is necessary.
The only way to end death is not to do death and violence under any circumstances whatsoever. When death has no birth in us, it simply cannot be born for the future. The life and death of Jesus Christ is instructive in this regard.
As a society, the logic of death as a communicating cancer is today everywhere about us. We justify violence and death in a multitude of "reasonable" causes but each time we do we give death a new life in our society as it spreads everywhere. When death in a society spreads far enough and deep enough, we have a culture of death where death is accepted as normal, correct -- even morally obligatory or justified to solve our personal and social problems. By degrees, we become inured to death and each further step becomes easier than the first. Until finally we inhabit a society of death.
Thus when we accepted death as a solution for a "bad" pregnancy, it began as severely limited to the life of the mother, incest or rape. Twenty years later, it is now abortion on demand. Taking 1.6 million human lives a year is accepted as normal and commonplace. It has become "no big deal," even a "right."
By the same reasoning death has spread to euthanasia, to those dying in great pain, once again with safeguards. Soon courts will permit the next of kin and guardians to exercise this "constitutional right" on those who cannot make their own decisions (the incompetent, the comatose). This is happening today in the Netherlands, which permits euthanasia: One third of those euthanized have been put to death by doctors without their consent nor even that of their next of kin.
Every state in the union cries out for more death through the death penalty. Texas with the highest number of inmates on death row has already in 1994 put to death three times more prisoners than any other state in the union (54), with not the slightest reduction of crime in the state. This matters not at all. The citizens of the state have become inured to death, stamping out the rational alternatives to death. They demand more death for those who kill. There is no end to the spiral.
The footprints of death are all over this nation: mothers who kill their children; children who kill and are killed; handguns in the hands of millions of citizens for killing in self-defense; proposals (quashed for the time being, but surely only for the time being) to create human embryos who are then killed after a few days in the course of scientific experimentation; growing domestic violence and spousal abuse; a million new cases each year of physically and sexually abused children; an increase in violent crime, particularly rape and murder; violence against abortion clinics for the violence going on therein; etc.
The footprints of death all over the landscape of America show up as violence. Citizens are afraid to go out after dark, to walk the streets. There are no safe places to be. Violence and death may come upon anyone, anywhere at any time. All these footprints are traceable back to our society's disrespect for human life, starting from its inception and ending with deliberate termination of human life at the end.
We are a culture of death because now most of our social problems are solved by death. We have learned to live with death and each of us cheers death for our particular cause (abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, just war, etc.). We are confused and frightened, so we call for more death to solve death. The bloody footprints of death are all over the landscape.
Peter J. Riga is a lawyer.