Hawkeye, when you use such a phrase as "Human beings have to die...the herd needs to be thinned out (sounds cold but that's reallity)" it certainly didn't sound like you were including able-bodied folk, especially when in the previous paragraph you speak of children with disabilities being born and sueing because they were not genetically "fixed."
My niece is disabled. Tasha, has a muscular and developmental disorder that doctors don't even know what it is. Her mind is intact, she's got the mental abilities of every other 9 year old girl. But she cannot speak due to deformation of her soft palet. She can't even use sign language because her hands are so twisted. She can't walk, she can't feed herself, her smile lights up a room, and her eyes are so expressive you can get lost in them. Her body is constantly in pain, sometimes so great the only release she has is to cry. What her mother and I wouldn't give to ease her pain. If there was some way, genetic or otherwise, that we could give Tasha the ability to end her pain, to see her muscles untwist from themselves so she could grow without the agony, we'd be first there. Whould her mother have known she was disabled in the womb, I don't know what she'd've done, but I'm sure she probably would've taken any measure not to make Tasha perfect, but to prevent the amount of pain and suffering she has had to go through because of her disability. She wouldn't change Tasha for the world.
Hawkeye, you state that such a disability might be a character builder, an obsticle to overcome. Why is it such an obsticle? Why must it be overcome if you also state that people need to be accepted for whom they are? Tasha's disability, it certainly is an obstical, but not for her. She has lived this way all her nine years of life and knows know other way to be. It is definately draining on her mother, who has been fraught and frazzled trying to arrange her life to be at Tasha's beck and call. Her mother has difficulty maintaining a job because of Tasha's physical therapy hours, has trouble financially because some of Tasha's specialist are not covered by insurance, and she is emotinally overwrought by having to deal with her child's suffering, with the new "problems" that pop up as Tasha's body attempts to go through puberty and growth the way a "normal" child's body does, and each new growth spurt brings on new challenges. Caring for Tasha is certainly challenging and character building as we struggle to accept that she will have this disability for her entire life, and that life may be short. But for Tasha? She loves the Backstreet Boys, and has a crush on one of her aides at school. Her disability is not an obsticle for her, it is the way life is. What has she to overcome except perhaps the inability to lift a fork to her own mouth? Why should she have to if her disability won't let her? Hell, I wouldn't mind someone feeding me and releasing me of that taxing effort sometimes.
Herds are thinned because of illness and weakness, old age and accidents. Predators don't often take down a healthy individual, and natural selection will have healthy individuals reproduce more healthy individuals to keep the species from extinction. Humans have no other natural predator but themselves, so how else to thin the human herd unless we thin out ourselves? Shall we start the great ovens again, and have a lottery as to see which of us should die the great, glorious death so that others may live and our world not be over-run by out of control reproducing humans? Seems an easy concept when you think that, "rather you than me" attitude. Would you readily walk into your own death so that someone else may live the life you want? Or would you have natural selection mark the sick and infirm, the aged and disabled? Shall we all give up techonology completely, return to being hunter/gatherers, and toss aside all medical advancement along with it. I don't think a single one of us today would survive against a pride of hungry lions without at least a stone ax for defense. Tasha would be the first to make a meal seeing as how she'd be unable to flee unless the human herd carried her.
I've read "1984", I have also read the "I, Robot" series, I have also read "Stranger in a Strange Land," and "Soylent Green" and "The Heart of Darkness" and "Star Wars" and the "2001" series, and "Star Trek" novels and "Feirenheight 461". Science fiction is a cartharis of fears and imagination. There are two sides to every science fiction story, and your own perceptions of our world today color how you read such books, either with fear or with hope. But you cannot have it one way or the other in reallity. In order to reap the benefits, you must also face the horrors.
No, I'm not religious either. But religion colors perception. We have a USA president right now trying to ban stem cell research because he is a TV Eveanglist. That is his interpretation of God. Why does it also have to be mine? Such moves as his are only going to drive research underground, where there will be no control over it, where the horrors of science fiction can more easily become reallities. Religion is used to stop sexual education, is used to stop research, is used as an excuse to live in fear. To understand people's fear, you have to get inside and understand their religion. Religion isn't just a book or a preacher, religion is the internal digestion and intergration of mass opinion manifesting itself in a metaphor of social behaviors. You can take any one of your science fiction novels and make a religion out of it. "Stranger in a Strange Land" is prime example of that!
The "just because we can doesn't mean we should" argument is one that rackles me always. If we weren't meant to do something, why the heck are we able to in the first place? Do you think Ford was worried about whether he should develop the automobile just because he could? Do you think if he knew about global warming, about habitat fragmentation, about how quickly disease will be spread because of ease of transportation he've thrown his blue-prints in the garbage? Bell wasn't the only person to invent the telephone, which goes to show that if it isn't you who discovered it, someone else will. "Necessity is the mother of invention" and if such things as transgentics weren't necessary, there would have been no need for such research, it wouldn't be funded, and we wouldn't be having these debates today.
Someone, somewhere, somehow needs transgentic research to progress, needs stem-cell research to progress. Research can't be done for research sake anymore. In order to get funding, especially in genetic research, you must prove to those with the money how that research will benefit humankind or benefit the Earth in some way. All research has to be presented as such, or else no one will fund it. Even millitary research must benefit humans in some way, even if it means the mass distruction of "Them" to preserve "Us".
Humans are animals, and we cannot help but to interfere. Elephants interfere when they strip trees for food, causing desertfication. Wolves interfere when they kill a deer. All animals inerfere with the lives of all others. All animals are selfish. Trust me, your dog does not love you because of the goodness of its heart, it does so because it fears your dominance and because you feed it. Taking humans off the pedistal doesn't mean raising others above us. Read "Catchalot" by Allen Dean Foster. Talk about a species-ego driven story. Humans are surviving, simple as that, and if it was between me and a pack of lions, I personally am not prepared to die.
~~Colesea
