Readers' Requests

I'd call it the Mailbag, but some of it's not mail, and that'd sound like I was copying Drew.

I think you should write something about Euthanasia, like whether a terminally ill patient's family has the right to decide if they can die on their own terms. -Mai

Well Mai, this subject is at the center of attention quite a bit: last year with Terri Schiavo, and a couple months ago a supreme court ruling upheld Oregon's assisted suicide laws. After a little research, I found that euthanasia and assisted suicide aren't the same thing (although closely related). Euthanasia is when somebody else kills the person who wants to die (through lethal injection or some other painless way). Assisted suicide is when somebody else gives the person who wants to die the means to (a doctor hooking a patient up to an IV, and the patient pushes a button that delivers a lethal dose). For the purposes of this discussion, these differences don't matter.

Usually I don't like killing. But when you could maybe live for a couple more painful months, who really wants to spend their last days laying in a hospital with tubes coming out of every opening in their body, doped up so that they just lay in a constant stupor? Or in the case of Terri Schiavo, we had a person who was a vegetable. Her brain was gone, and she wasn't going to come back at all. So, her husband had the decency to let her die, like I think she was intended to in the first place. Recently conservatives tried to have these privileges taken away from the people of Oregon because they don't like the fact that people can choose when they want to live or die (the Supreme Court upheld Oregon's laws). In fact, the name usually given to this issue is the "Right to Die". It's the same way with abortion, but I won't go into that now.

I think you should write something about outsourcing. -T.J.

What can I say about outsourcing? It's the practice of companies firing their American employees and having those employees replaced with people from another country like India. Why? Because it costs less. Textile jobs and the other less skilled jobs have been outsourced to places like Thailand, China, Mexico (you name a place with loose labor laws and it's got sweatshops spitting out clothing for American consumers) for a long time. More recently, computer and engineering related jobs have been going to India. Often, the Indian worker has an American or other western education, but they'll take lower pay. Is this right? Depends, are you a C.E.O. (isn't it funny that theirs are the only jobs safe from outsourcing?), or are you a member of the other 99.9 % of America? I myself think that when we stop making anything for ourselves, we'll be at the mercy of the rest of the world. Since I don't like outsourcing, I think that major corporations should be better regulated by the federal government. Nothing extreme, just that the government do something about the extremely rich C.E.O. types screwing over their American and foreign workers so that they can be even richer. Kind of level the playing field, just a little.

What do you think about the sectarian violence in Iraq right now? -Anonymous

One of the main reasons Iraq is a bad place to be for anybody right now is that Iraqis don't see themselves as Iraqis. They see Shias, Sunnis, and Kurds. Even that wouldn't be so bad if they had any religious tolerance. It would be like me (a Methodist) hating Catholics just because they don't believe exactly what I do, so I'd form a militia with my other Methodist holy warriors and march across town to clean out some Catholics, but on the way, a group of armed Lutherans sees my group and shoots an RPG at us, starting a battle that soon attracts the Catholics. After the fight is broken up by the police, 30 people are dead. And then we blame the police for not keeping us safe. Part of it is the police's (who symbolize the American presence in Iraq) fault, lack of planning for the postwar, not anticipating the violent streak of the minority Sunnis, etc. But, get real, who picked up their gun and marched across town to kill somebody who's only crime is saying evening prayers at 6:30 instead of 7 (I don't really know what the different beliefs of the different sects are)?

We can't really leave Iraq until Iraqis keep religion out of government, and are able to respect each others' ideas as different, but not wrong.