Here's The Beef

<>It’s not like you haven’t heard of one, right? I mean the whole country has heard of living wills and all adults pretty much know they should have one. Am I wrong? I work in a law office and about fifty-percent of our business is estate planning which includes Powers of Attorney and Living Wills. Now, everybody knows they need one. We have people come in all the time who are going to go into the hospital for surgery, etc. who suddenly wake up and decide, “oh, I’d better get this going now.”

So you got Terry Schiavo now, causing this huge uproar all over the United States and even in the BBC news with people saying, “Pull the tube!” or “No, that’s murder!” and speculating on whether she’d want to live that way or whether they’d want to live that way when it’s really none of their business but it was only HER business except she never MADE it her business and that’s why there’s this big mess now.

Her husband says that one evening in front of a movie she said she’d never want to live like that. Her friend says that one afternoon she said, “Where there’s life, there’s hope.” Who knows, and who cares. If there’s no living will, there’s just a big mess and she screwed up all of her rights by not taking them when she could and it sucks for her because maybe she’d just as soon be dead but maybe, just maybe she’d just as soon be alive. WE DON’T KNOW. And all it would have taken would have been fifteen minutes to execute a living will.

ARE YOU COVERED??? DO YOU HAVE YOUR LIVING WILL SET UP??? It doesn’t matter what you’ve told your spouse… what if your parents didn’t understand that. What if, by not having that living will, you have set it up so that there will always be bitterness between your spouse and your family or between your children. How stupid is that?

When a document is so simple, so inexpensive, and so easy to obtain, it’s just irresponsible and inexcusable not to have one. Look at the time, agony, mess and horror that’s been caused by one little Florida woman who didn’t bother to make a Living Will.

Okay, I’m Christian so everybody is going to think I’m opposed to the death penalty because of that but, actually, I’m not sure I’m really opposed to the death penalty. I can’t say I’d actually rule it out in every case or that I’d never recommend it if I were part of a jury. I just don’t know, but I do wonder what good it does or what’s the point when the damage has already been done.

I figure Scott Peterson is probably guilty. I certainly didn’t follow the trial closely. I don’t have the stomach or enough morbid curiosity for that kind of stuff, but I would guess the jury made a pretty good call on his guilt. Nevertheless, what’s the point of killing the guy. That seems so… well, irrevocable.

I realize he killed his wife and unborn baby, but killing him won’t get them back and just brings the rest of us down to his level, doesn’t it? And I don’t know if it deters other murderers from doing the same thing. I mean if we really wanted to deter other murderers then we should get rid of the rules against cruel and unusual punishment and institute some of THAT.

If we’d TRULY like to deter would-be murderers, wouldn’t it make more sense to do something cruel and unusual to those who murder, like – I don’t know – amputate their penises and testicles without any anesthesia? Or maybe pierce an eyeball or pull several teeth, something like that? Perhaps Scott Peterson should be forced to sit in a room each day and face a picture of Laci and ultra sound of Connor and write something about them or be caned on a weekly basis for the rest of his life, or both. That would be so much more deterrent than death.

I’ve met some people who had murder potential in my past. Honestly, I’ve met some of the biggest street scum you could imagine, and one thing I noticed was that none of them liked pain – oh no, not one little bit. You could shoot them or knife them, but if you wanted to insert an IV they would be like little babies! They would do ANYTHING to avoid THAT type of pain. I’m thinking that if they knew that for the rest of their lives they would and could be subject to frequent random medical experimentation of a painful nature, or perhaps be a human crash dummy, they would definitely think twice before doing something so heinous as murder.

“Wouldn’t it be horrible to amputate a guy’s penis or stab out his eye or torture him in some way only to find out he was innocent, though?” you ask.

Well, yes… but it’s just as horrible to put him to death and find out he was innocent… as a matter of fact THAT is even worse so my way would not only be a better deterrent but would also allow the person to at least continue living.

So, the new bankruptcy laws are now being voted into place. I work in a law office and the lawyers there say they’re not going to do anymore Chapter 7s. They say that the lawyer is now going to be responsible for the veracity of the information filed on the affidavit so they don’t want to file any more Chapter 7s… at least no more personal ones… the same rules don’t hold true for businesses – of course, NOT for businesses. Let the regular guys go under and bend, maybe break, under the strain of their debt, but heaven forbid if the business should have a problem.

I love how they pass a law so that Mastercard, Visa, and Discover are all protected… now they have to get paid, no debts are going to be excused, and yet no law is being passed to protect the young college kids out there from their aggressive marketing of their toxic credit cards to them. Nor are any laws passed about the commercialism that makes us all drown in debt. Why don’t we pass some laws to help us avoid GETTING into debt instead of trying to strong arm us into paying the damn debt that we were seduced into by corporations, advertisers, and friends of the Bush administration… (and all the administrations, I know it isn’t JUST him, much as he sickens me.)

It’s like they’ve got us from all sides… they want to market to us until they’ve sucked us dry, until we will spend the rest of our lives working at their lousy stores and factories just to pay all of our wages to them while they reach out and seduce new people into their webs. Do you realize that there will be suicides over this?! Young people who get themselves into deep debt by age 25 will see a gray future in front of them.. a future with no hope of digging themselves out of a hole, and they will kill themselves.

I am so glad that I will not be standing in the shoes of these men (who made these decisions) when that final (judgment) day comes because they surely will have to account for these decisions.