WENDY MOi l
DN message—‘Skip the Vote’?
1i s a narsn reality to swallow,
but my non-Daily Nebraskan
friends constantly tell me they
pick up the DN for three reasons —
the crossword puzzle, Calvin and The
Far Side.
One friend said Calvin and Hobbes
was the glue that bound her to the
Daily Nebraskan because the puzzle
made her feel stupid, and she under
stood only about one in every three
Far Sides. I worry about her, but I
think she has a point.
In circles outside the DN, I don’t
think the paper ipltiken very seri
ously. It makes me sad io walk to class
and see 12 hours of my hard work
lying crumpled under a seat. “Hey!” I
want to say. “That’s my layout you
just stepped on.”
In some ways, I guess AS UN and
the DN are in the same boat — very
full of themselves and struggl ing furi -
ously to be taken seriously. It seems
odd, however, that despite the simi
larities, the two groups can’t seem to
get along.
Just as AS UN shakes its tiny fists at
the all-powerful Nebraska Legisla
ture — often to no avail — the Daily
Nebraskan, a paper with the fifth
largest circulation in the state, is the
last to hear from the school’s own
board of regents.
As a journalism student, I’ve tried
for so long to be objective and get both
sides of the story that sometimes I feel
like I can’t think for myself. I con
stantly see both sides of an issue, and
my opinions tend to be swayed by
whoever I’m with at the moment.
“Good point,” I think. But “on the
other hand” keeps popping into my
head. Some might call it flip-flop
ping, but I prefer to think of it as
seeing both sides of an issue.
This tendency to straddle the is
sues is especially difficult for me at
this lime of year, because it’s ASUN
election time — again.
Time for campaign promises and
free' candy on campus. Time to see
flyers strewn across campus like so
In some ways, I
guess ASUN and the
DN are in the same
boat — very full of
themselves and
struggling furiously
to be taken
seriously.
many Godfather’s inserts. Time for
the Daily Nebraskan to rip apart what
it considers fluff proposals and joke
candidates.
This “liberal rag” takes pride in its
attitude toward the Association of
Students of the University of Ne
braska. And for some reasons I agree
with it.
I think the attendance chart that
hangs outside the ASUN office not
only looks like a second-grade read
ing list tabulation, but it insults both
the senators and the students. I think
bicycle racks arc the least of our wor
ries. I think COLAGE deserves fund
ing. I think resumes aren’t as impor
tant as budget cuts.
Now for the “other hand.” When
members of ASUN do try to address
serious issues, everyone— members
of the DN staff included — laughs at
their puny attempts at greatness and
quickly points out that ASUN has no
real power and shouldn’t pretend to.
Well, if they hajfc no power, why
not let them workffhemselvcs into a
frenzy over bike racks and the lack of
student parking?
It’s time to stop the petty back
and-torth bantering and get down to
issues. If we hope to make any head
way with this budget ax looming over
our head, people are going to have to
work together.
I’m sure this idea has the entire
south half of the Nebraska Union in an
uproar. These two groups have been
at odds for as long as I can remember. (
But underneath the empty prom
ises and selfish ambition, a kernel of
value exists in the hearts of AS UN
senators who are trying to look out for
the interests of their fellow students.
On the one hand, the Daily
Nebraskan’s continual hounding of
ASUN frivolity carries out a
newspaper’s responsibility — to be .
the watchdog of public officials. When
Andrew Sigerson makes homophobic
and offensive statements, he deserves
to have those statements printed in the
ragingly popular Quotes of the Week 1
section.
On the other hand, people keep
getting upset and blaming students
for not voting in student elections.
“That’s a blatant display of apathy!”
they cry. But, after seeing bickering
and bad-mouthing for months on end,
who wants to go out and vote for the
candidates, anyway? Why waste
everyone’s time going to the polls
when nothing is going to be accom
plished that really matters?
What scares me is that, at some
point, the DN is going to have to
endorse one party or another — un
doubtedly a party the editors couldn’t
poke enough fun at just a month or
two earlier. If things go in a linear
direction, one would almost antici
pate an election-day editorial that
reads: “Skip the vote; Non-issues no
longer warrant student attention.”
That’s the last thing anyone at this
paper wants to happen. But what if
that is the message we are sending
out, however inadvertently.
Mott Is a senior news-editorial and En
glish major, a Daily Nebraskan news editor
and a columnist
(i \\<\ ^ <)i \<;
Euthanasia offers easy way out
As confidence in the so-called
Age of Reason wanes, the
west has a lot to learn from
— obscure as it may sound — Dutch
history.
During the 1800s, instability threat
ened a Europe enraged by the spirit of
the French Revolution. To theircredit,
the Dutch were the most resistant to
the Enlightenment’s more radical
impulses. Their reflective posture in a
continent of turmoil saved them from
the bloody fate unwittingly chosen by
so many of their’’enlightened” neigh
bors.
Ironically, times have changed in
the Netherlands; again the Dutch prove
to be informative. But this time they
have set out on the sad, lonely course
of euthanasia.
As the lest case the world is watch
ing, the Dutch are once again teaching
us about the destructiveness of
unrestrained freedom. Ifwe dare learn
from their experience, the empirical
data gathered on the Dutch use of so?
called mercy-killings would pul eu
thapasia to rest in any merciful
person’s mind.
In a recent article in the journal
Commentary, University of Chicago
biologist and doctor Leon Kass has
analyzed the Dutch government's of
ficial report about euthanasia. The
profile provided by the report is abso
lutely frightening.
For example, out of the 25,300
cases of euthanasia in Holland a year,
1,000 of the deaths arc classified as
“direct active involuntary” euthana
sia. That is to say, a doctor actively
killed a patient against his or her will.
Morphine overdoses were used to kill
8,100 patients; in 61 percent of those
cases, it was done without the patient’s
knowledge or consent.
Doctors justified their use of mor
tal force by assuring that the patients
Being a doctor
should mean getting
into the trenches
with a patient,
shouldering their
sorrow, struggling
with their grief.
had a “low quality of life” or “had no
prospects of improvement.” The doc
tors also claimed that they were kill
ing the patient on behalf of the family
who “could not take it anymore.”
Strangely, however, in 45 percent of
the cases in which people were termi
nated without their personal consent,
doctors killed the patient without the
family’s knowledge or consent as well.
The question forced by this data is
obvious: How could doctors do this?
The Dutch experiment teaches us
that euthanasia is a particularly slip
pery slope: Assisting patients in vol
untary suicides leads inevitably to
involuntary termination of life. The
question for policy makers is not only
whether a caring relative can assent to
a doctor’s resuscitation efforts, or
agree to stopping support for a person
whose life is only a matter of machin
ery. Rather, the danger of euthanasia
is much more profound, much more
insidious.
A dispositional clinical shift oc
curs when a doctor begins to assist in
suicide. Principled defense of life at
nearly all costs is transformed into a
new approach to patients in which
death is just one type of therapy. *
Being a doctor should mean get
ting into the trenches with a patient,
shouldering their sorrow, struggling
with their grief. It also means being
unwilling to accede to the weak part
of each of us which occasionally and
usually temporarily feels like it would
be better not to live. Doctors, ideally,
are priests of hope.
In the New Medicine, however,
the Hippocratic Oath is replaced by a
utilitarian worksheet; precious life is
dehumanized into a technical com
modity. As Kass writes: “What will
happen when the doctor’s unswerving
allegiance to the patient’s best inter
ests once he is entitled to start think
ing that death by injection is a pos
sible ‘treatment option’?”
The Hemlock’society, a group
which advocates euthanasia, argues
on grounds of principled liberty that
the United States should adopt the
Dutch model wholesale. In the open
ing of the book “Final Exit,” author
Derek Humphrys challenges codified
taboos against suicide, claim ing moral
high ground: “Aren’t these laws
(against assisting suicide) ready to be
changed to situations befitting mod
em understanding and morality?"
For Humphrys, embracing the
brave new world of pulling humans to
sleep like injured pels is a matter of
course in enlightened people’s minds.
Only archaic, backward primitives
would challenge this moral progress
— neatly packaged in a legal fiction
called “tne right to die.”
Young k a first-year law student and a
Dally Nebraskan columnist.
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