From Tajikistan Travels:
"Sharifmo explains that she, her mother and her son, Mustapha - now
aged 2, live in one room in her brother's house (her husband is away
indefinitely working in Russia but they are not wanted there. Her
brother is violent and she is scared of him and she has at times felt
suicidal. She suddenly stands on a chair and shows us how she wanted to
hang herself. Sharifmo was only 12 years old when her parents arranged
for her to be married. It was the middle of the civil war and soldiers
used to come to her parents' house and threaten to take her. Sharifmo's
mother told her that it was better for her to marry than be raped."
[Her husband is away indefinitely working in Russia, since there is no
work where they live, but can rarely send money, so the family lives in
complete destitution].
In
nature there are no rights. "Rights" are a human construct, a political
and moral idea to regulate human behaviour, reinforced by laws. Our
complex and overcrowded human society needs this construct to try to
balance people's freedoms, because so much modern human activity
interferes with or restricts freedoms in one way or another. We just
don't have enough 'room' (physically or culturally) to allow everyone
absolute freedom, so we have established this idea of 'rights'
as a means of restricting some people's freedom to avoid its negative
impact on everyone else's. Rights are a replacement, a compensation,
for the reductions of freedom that are an inevitable requirement of
civilization. Every right we 'grant' reduces the absolute freedom of
someone else. My right of assembly reduces your freedom to crush
opposing views. A girl's right not to be forced to marry against her
personal wishes reduces many religions' freedom to subjugate the wishes
of the individual in the interest of the collective.
Most
scientists believe sick animals go off by themselves to die. This is
not purely altruism, though it can free up the rest of the flock from
the responsibility of looking after a particularly vulnerable member,
and reduce their exposure to any contagious disease. It is rather an
instinct to be alone during time of great suffering. Alone, under
cover, often means out of harm's way, less visible to predators,
improving its chance of survival if the illness should prove to be
temporary.
In early civilization suicide was both illegal and
viewed by religion as sinful (and remains so today in many parts of the
world). Suicide is, after all, an affront to the political order. It
suggests that all is not right with the world, and maybe those in power
have some responsibility for that. In the case of prisoners, it is a
means of 'cheating justice', so extraordinary measures are taken (in
almost every country in the world) to prevent incarcerated people from
killing themselves, to force-feed them when they go on hunger strikes,
and to drug them so they can be declared sane enough to face justice, including execution.
Making
suicide illegal is, however, unpalatable to political leaders, since it
appears very heavy-handed, so politicians have encouraged religions to
make it their business to
frighten adherents away from suicide with stories of eternal suffering,
and condemnations of cowardice and social irresponsibility. For those
not susceptible to religious propaganda or fear of legal prosecution,
the state has in recent centuries begun to use the pseudo-science of
psychology to declare people 'mentally ill' and hence lock them up and
keep them alive against their will, indefinitely (a true 'life
sentence'). Most people (who don't often encounter the 'mentally ill')
have now been effectively brainwashed into believing that 'mental
illness' is a real disease (and not what it really is, a metaphor
for "socially unpopular thoughts, feelings and behaviours"), and into
believing that, with mind-altering drugs and 'therapy' it can be
'cured'. No matter that experiments have repeatedly shown that all
animals, including humans, subjected to prolonged crowding or other
severe stress manifest endemic "socially unpopular thoughts, feelings
and behaviours" (we call these manifestations, among other things, wars -- but these manifestations, since they are led by political leaders, are exempted from the definition of 'mental illness').
There
is no limit to this slippery slope, as the Bush regime is now planning
on testing all children who exhibit "socially unpopular thoughts,
feelings and behaviours" of all kinds, in the views of
government-certified psychiatrists with close links to the
pharmaceutical industry, and subjecting them to mandatory expensive
drug treatment, and removal from their parents' custody if they don't
comply.
And of course, when there is no "mental illness" excuse
for preventing suicide, as in those who are suffering unbearable and
sustained physical pain, the politicians jump back in and ban 'assisted
suicide', so you end up with the absurd situation that committing
suicide is not illegal but assisting someone who begs you to help them
do so is murder. Such a tangled web we weave!
Don't get me
wrong. I'm not saying that suicide prevention is always a bad idea.
Many people have dark moments in their lives when they did things, or
tried to do things, they later regretted. But suicide is not often a
spontaneous decision, and I believe there should be limits on the
ability of the state to strip away freedoms, including the freedom to
take one's own life, when the exercise of those freedoms does not
severely interfere with the freedoms of others, and is prohibited
merely as an exercise in complicit state and religious sanctimony.
While talking about committing suicide, and even a sloppy attempt at
suicide, may in fact be a 'plea for help', anyone who thinks people who
commit or seriously attempt suicide are merely screaming for attention
or attempting to make others feel badly, is guilty of fuzzy thinking,
horrific insensitivity to anguish and suffering, and cruelty to all
concerned.
Suicide is an act of desperation. Here is a story,
written shortly after the photo above was taken, of one such act. It
was not the woman in the picture, but another very young woman, with
four young children. We do what we can. And if that fails, we do what
we must.
The most political suicides of all, of course, are
those of 'suicide bombers'. Bush wants the press to refer to them as
something else less suggestive of martyrdom. In an article today in Alternet,
Nichole Argo reviews studies of suicide bombers and concludes that
bombers are not motivated by brainwashing, religious fanaticism or
extreme poverty (they come from predominantly middle-class backgrounds)
so much as by peer-to-peer communication and solidarity. Knowing
someone personally who has 'signed up' to wage war against a perceived
oppressor or injustice is the main attribute of recruits. They also
have a sense of 'nothing left to lose': "As one Palestinian told a
reporter: 'If we don't fight, we will suffer. If we do fight, we will
suffer, but so will they.' " The witnessing of civilian
casualties, suffering and destruction provides the tinder for suicide
bombers to act, she says, but it is social networking, affinity, personal connection, not ideology, that drives it.
It
has nothing to do with courage, or with cowardice, and it is not
anti-social, and not a 'statement'. Suicide is a personal act, a final
act that acknowledges the actor simply felt he, or she, alone, had no other alternative.
In some cases, we might have been able, or might yet be able, in time,
to create some other alternatives. In most cases, there is nothing we
can or should do.
Ultimately it is not political, it is personal, a bringing to an end of unbearable individual anguish. It is not about us at all.
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
