Death by any other name

"Collateral damage" are the words that are used to describe the situation where US soldiers are killing Iraqi civilians - men, women and children. The words "collateral damage" have no emotional impact, no sense of urgency and no sense of something wrong. If those same words, "collateral damage" were to describe U.S. police killing U.S. civilians - men, women and children, would we accept that? When a person, drunk beyond the ability to walk, drives a car into many people, killing them, do we call that "collateral damage" or "murder"? Yet all of these acts are unintentional death.

Notice how the emotional content of death changes when we change the name of who is killed. Killing "terrorists" is much more different than killing "children".

What about death being invisible? We carefully counted the deaths on 9/11, yet we carefully avoided all counts of death and missing by Hurricane Katrina. We all noticed how one missing child in another country (Bahamas) was front line news everywhere while many missing local children were not even mentioned on those same reports.

So people are dying from lack of health care, sometimes even dying when they have insurance that should cover the health care and they are denied that insurance. "Denied insurance" - notice how we should be saying "denied health care". If a ambulance driver "denied health care", would we call that murder? I think yes. So why can health care companies steal people's money through insurance premiums and murder them by denying health care and we just call them "successful business people"?

So is it "fighting cancer" or "killing human life", since cancer is 100% human? Yet we have all felt the difference between "abortion" and a "medical procedure". So why doesn't a "fighting cancer" and "abortion" have the same emotional weight and the same sense of right/wrong. Ohhh - some human life is valued and some human life is not valued! And isn't that the very point that I am making?

The terms of ending life come in so many varieties: genocide, murder, self defense, homeland security, collateral damage, missing, medical procedure and accident.

And then to change the names of ending life, we play with what is the meaning of word "life". After all, you can't "murder" a rock since it is never alive. So my Republican friends now carefully always tell me that life begins at conception. So does that make human eggs and human sperm dead like rocks? Or is there a new status between living and dead, sort of like zombies, an "undead". So two undead meet and merge, then magically we have human "life". Life from unlife! OK, why is "human eggs" and "human sperm" are not being called "human life"? Because if "human sperm" were "human life", then a "wet dream" because the death of millions of human lives. Because if "human sperm" were "human life", then certain male sexual acts would become the intentional killing of millions of human lives, i.e. "mass murder".

It is all word games on death. For would a rose by any other name smell as sweet? Would it mean the same if I said, "Would a plant genitalia smell as sweet by any other name?"