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Christianity
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Jesus - Self-dying for others: Altruism
Here's a generic approach to Jesus Christ written to cover all bases. I attempt to offend no careful reader-thinker. It's impossible to please everyone, I admit.
Whoever you are and wherever you find yourself on your journey of faith, you are welcome to join Jesus Christ on his mission from God. In return eternal salvation becomes a conseqence of selecting a Jesus-like approach to others. Jesus’ central messages of justice, love and compassion finds complete expression in his self-sacrifice.
Besides,"He who loves his life loses it." "Love your neighbor". More to come. Eddie Evans
Why do you write about suicide and suicide cleanup?
For one reason, I write about suicide because it's a hobby, an academic hobby.
For another reason, I also have an interest in the social sciences. Suicide has a public record we can research. Just like researching stars, blowers, and animals, suicide exists as a fact. We can measure suicide and apply statistical methods to it. We can apply psychological, sociological, and social-psychological theories to suicide.
When one does suicide cleanup for years, and after witnessing the consequences of suicide numerous times, I find therapy in writing about what I've learned. Everyone needs therapy. If not for one thing in life, then another. Some people find therapy in exercise, others self-medicating, and still others through abstract ideas. I find writing allows me some relaxation, therapy.
I also study suicide academically and on the job. My BA in sociology introduced me to suicide studies. My MS work in educational counseling sparked a greater interest in suicide studies.
My reading in World Literature, including American Literature, often deals with meaning of life issues as well as suicide. So I keep my interest in this area of thinking for academic and professional reasons. So this is how I came to Donne's Biothanatos (self-murder or self-death). That's off my thread, though,and here I need to keep clear for what's coming.
What I've seen and learned about suicide tells me it's a closed world. Suicide victims may begin planning their suicide from an early age. They may also begin planning their suicide in a spur-moment. The former usually have an on-going suicidal vocation. It's that they've rarely been without suicidal thoughts. For the latter, suicide shows a way out of an untenable situation.
Perhaps the spur-of-the-moment suicide planner gave suicide some consideration throughout their life. Then they would be like anyone else. Now they become different. Their suicide ideas take on an urgency, a rashness at times. Suicide no longer represents a fantasy or day dream. I represents a way out. Shame, disgust, poverty, failure, and other negative emotions give rise to suicide. A psychotic episode of a self-injuring, rash suicide, whose suicide arises a a twist in their life road, breaks bonds with a newly closed world.
Reasons for Suicide and Reasons Against
Starvation - Pain - Torture
Our first suicides went unrecorded. How could I know? Easy. We look to Eskimos and others living lives with little to no surplus value, leftovers. Others living close to wild nature found fast food hard to come by, in many cases. In those days, "fast food" meant fast food, catch it or starve. Ironically, today we eat fast food from fast food restraints leading to slow suicide for many of us. Never has humanity witnessed millions of human beings eat causing self-death.
So I'm alluding to starvation as a reason for suicide. Where food shortage threaten a social group, a group's elderly become expendable, surplus people because of their inability to contribute to group survival. If we could print out a social contract for such groups, its themes must adhere to sexual conduct, child rearing, a social hierarchy, and an understood suicide clause. In effect, a social norm exists for committing suicide upon failure to contribute to one's group. Whether or not this continues today in significant numbers, we cannot know. I suspect the Congo might produce meaningful numbers if we could gather such data.
I can imagine terrible injuries created by hunting wild animals. It takes little imagination to see our ancestors jumping from cliffs to their deaths, ending unbearable pain. Even accidental injuries from camp fires must have accounted for great burn injuries. The list grows.
Most of us would seem to agree that under some circumstances, pain, it's hard to judge others at the end of their rope in pain management. A guy can inject only so much pain killer until quality of life hits bottom. Then there's always intense, incurable pain no amount of pain killer will end.
We've heard a lot about what constitutes torture since our United States went into the involuntary rendition business. This means we take people against their will and fly them, last class, to a county with strong willed torture experts. And it's not for me to pass judgment, although I have come close to torture experiences at the hands of my two sisters as we matured.
It seemed that during our summer vacations they danced in glee at the thought of "torturing Eddie." Like many seven year-olds in summer months, I frolic through neighborhood sprinklers, shorts only. This gave my sisters (one 6 years older and the other 4 years older) an opportunity to grab me, pin my back to the ground, and tap-tap-tap a "Chinese torture" on my mid-breast bone. Before long this tap-tap-tap with their index fingers focusing on a dead-center area produced something between pain and an excruciating tickle. Try as I might, cry as I might, their Chinese torture convinced me that I'm against any torture.
Bringing these experience forward some 56 years, I see how torture might lead one to question life's value. It seems to me that unendurable pain and fear of a worse death cause me to question how long I could old out. I know my sisters' laughs came as a sadistic joy compared to my shrieks for mercy.
What I've learned, every person has their season to die; some embrace it, others prevent it. Then there's those folks waiting for the last straw to fall, metaphorically. They've subconsciously assured their selves early in life that they're not about to put up with persistent setbacks and perceived injustices in their world. "One day I'll show them," becomes a subliminal, repeating message:
To be, or not to be: that is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a se of troubles, And by opposing end them.
(William Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 3, scene I)
I've commented on Ancient Greek philosophy and justifications for suicide. The name Cato comes to mind most often in this regard. For now, though, I prefer to fast-forward beyond our medieval period to Western Civilization's 16th century. Voluntary death became an intellectualized subject. "To be or not to be" arose as an intellectual question. Result, both the Church and the state oed it to themselves to react to it. Seeking substitutes, they joined hands in some cases.
Every man hath his time and season to die; some prevent it, others prolong it; there is a weaknesses and a valor in them both, but there is required discretion . . . . There is a time to gather fruit from the tree, which is a hang too long, it rotteth and growes worse and worse; and the losse is as great too, if it be gathered too soon.
Francis Bacon
Pros
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Live as long as you should, not as long as you can. (altruistic, elderly suicide)
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Live as if nature threw you into the world without choice, and live with a thousand exits.
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broken straw)
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Live in pain and show your coward, but die and show your will.
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Death is the remedy for all life.
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The most voluntary death is the fairest.
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For the most violent diseases the most violent death.
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God gives consent where it is worse to live than to die.
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As I do not offend the laws of thieves when I keep my own money, I offend no person when I carry away my own life.
Cons
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God is the master of our live; He has placed us on the earth for his glory and for the service of others. (Montaigne)
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We are not born for ourselves alone, and we have no right to desert our posts. (Montaigne)
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Laws prohibit us from ending our own lives.
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Virtue and courage dictate problems.
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Nature requires that we love ourselves.
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To kill oneself in order to escape evil throws us into a greater evil.
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Taking advantage of nonbeing cannot profit our situation when we cannot experience its reward.
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Nonbeing is not the solution; it is the negation of everything.
Bereavement means a period of grief. So when we say, "The bereaved," we mean someone grieving the loss of someone close.
Kübler-Ross developed an explanation that included five stages of grief. She introduced these stages in her book, On Death and Dying.
It describes the death process as it developers through 5. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance come into play as the bereaved copes with the loss of another if not their own life. These terms help to tell what emotions a person might be experience at anyone moment as they move through bereavement following a suicide or other type of death. They are not stops on some linear timeline in grief. Not everyone goes through all of them or in a prescribed order.
These stages are theoretical, then. Not everyone will go through these ; not everyone will go through all of them.
So dying people may differ in their progression towards death. Cultural influences also come into play.
We all react to death in our own terms. Generally, most of us will most of the time react by grieving and moving on with our lives. Some of us will at times react in troublesome patterns of behavior.
In bereavement we're challenged to cope with our loss. We all have tasks to work through as we go through bereavement, although these tasks remain more emotional than intellectual. These tasks affect our minds as body organs and even muscles undergo stress as mourning occurs for months, if not longer.
Perhaps we do not see problems where challenges exist. Just the same, a myriad of problems on emotional, physical, economic and social levels take place as we weather brutal moments of grief.
What some call "uncomplicated" bereavement becomes "complicated" by outstanding issues arising and causing negative outcomes.
A complicated bereavement may follow from an unanticipated suicide in the family or the loss of a close friend to suicide. Homicides occurring in violent circumstances may cause a complicated bereavement. Of course, we all expect complications more than one loss at a time, or within a short period of time. Death of a child leads to great ambivalence and grief as the suffering parents try to make sense of their universe.
A mourner’s history of losses, personality style, and belief system surrounding death influence complication of mourning. Traumatic events leading to death often lead to Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. There's no way around an unexpected death occurring by violent means.
We have learned that the differences between symptoms of post-traumatic stress (PTSD) and those of complicated grief becomes a task without end at times. Whose to tell if one suffers from a complicated mourning or PTSD? When a griever suffered from depression before the subject death, how might we differentiate this pre-morbid, emotional condition from the complicated grieving process to follow?
Current conditions adding to suicide grow worse with time. There's no correction in our future because our past allies lost standing and power. These allies constitute what Chris Hedges calls the "liberal class." These are politically concerned people with an interest in what radical right-wing propagandist attack with their propaganda. In The Death of the Liberal Class," Hedges points out the reality for working people:
The social demands of unions in the early twentieth century that gave the working class weekends off, the right to strike, the eight hour workday, and Social Security, have been abandoned. Universities, especially in political science and economics departments, parrot the discredited ideology of unregulated capitalism and have no new ideas.
Death of The Liberal Class - - Chris Hedges
Hedges points out a simple fact most of us have problems understanding, thanks to corporate media. This political system we call "two parties" has little to do with what's happened and what's coming. Our corporate state creates our problems for us, including ms-information. United States citizens have few places to go for corporate-free information. Right-wing talk radio claims to be under attack from "liberals" and democrats. This is hard to imagine considering the hundreds of right-wing talk radio shows in our country. Find a left-wing radio station, a real left-wing radio station, not luke-warm, day-old liberal go-along-to-get-along commentators. Hedges makes clear that as a social-political class, a group of people with similar ideological interests, liberals have become ineffective in their historical role. That role, to stand between the state's power and individual interests, became ineffective with World War I.
I must now move away from Hedges and more directly to my own thread woven to help explain suicide among white males in Western Society, particularly in our United States. How can we explain the extraordinarily high 73 percent suicide ratio of white males in these United States compared to other demographic groups?
Of course, "liberalism," as "liberals" with "liberal" mind sets remain, but in social and cultural value setting and beliefs, not movers-and-shakers of state power. If they did, we would live in a humanistic society without a military-industrial complex, a society based on egalitarian principals. A society dominated by education, medicine, and science. In effect, if unions existed at all, we would observe "one big union." Art, religion, science, social affairs, and philosophy (ecology and physics combined) would flourish in unimaginable directions.
But, as an effective political force, we can not speak of a "liberal class" of power directing United States social and political policy.
"Liberalism" in our United States now has a pejorative connotation; it means "bad," "unhelpful." So does "intellectual" and so forth. Words change by common usage and by newly created meanings in the hands of media powers. Historically, classical liberalism seeks world-wide use of constitutions, liberal democracies, freedom from state power, and fair elections. Naturally, we find human rights, free enterprise, free trade, and the freedom of religion within this ideological persuasion. Before World War I, many liberals saw a more humane world following a socialist path. Of course, all this changed as the capitalist colonialists went to war over reasons still unsettled. All of which meant the death of any truly meaningful liberalism. Today a social liberalism exists, and it exists in a horrific configuration created by mass marketing and consumerism. Recall how Victorian ways quickly changed among women and families as mass marketing lead to women smoking cigarettes; women fighting for the right to vote came well before Madison Avenue's purge of our more Victorian morality. Should we care? Yes and no.
We will grant liberals their due for the improvement of life among women, weekends, medical care, and so on. Redundantly, I say, as a historical force, a movement, their is no liberal class to stop the state's attack on individual freedom. We do find a shattered remnant remade by war, corporate power, and consolidation of state power within capital's domain of influence.
Word smiths twisted liberal for political gain by right-wing, corporate interests propagandizing on our public air waves. Now, where liberalism might actually mean something with historical roots we find before World War I. Today, "liberalism" becomes a curse word for life-styles, public education, unions, and more. I suppose animal shelters might fall under this term's usage at some times and places. After all, it would take a liberal bent of mind to wish a humane treatment of domestic animal life.
Again, look to the role of capitalism and corporate power for the American dream's configuration into a nightmare of decadence, not liberal ideas.
In fact, though, a social-political role for liberalism now remains in the Democratic Party, but ineffectively in terms of a liberal class: a host of people standing firmly, effectively between state power and the individual, between war and the dominant ideology. These remarks refer, of course, to Western Societies, not Asian.
Along with the liberal class or running parallel to it, came more powerful justifications for suicide. Did these justifications later play a role in white male suicides? Will we find an explanation for white male suicides in Western Society in the liberalization of Western Society? Did not the rift gouged between Catholicism and Protestantism unleash a more individual approach to interpretation of scripture? Correspondingly, science too found greater freedom to expand and diversify.
Liberal ideas propounded by an emerging liberal class help to consolidate these changes. Capitalism and the Protestant Ethic went hand-in-hand. So of course, correlations between liberalism, protestantism, and capitalism may exist historically; correlations, though, do not necessarily prove cause and effect by one or the other. So what of suicide in all of this?
And is it any wonder that suicide cleanup as an occupation continues to grow? White males, once thought to have a say in their future, no longer have much of anything to look forward to in many cases. They've joined so many minorities, but white males have not gauged their minds for what's happened to our new world. Minorities traditionally find a lower rung on our American social hierarchy. Their self-expectations allow for personal inadequacies and fewer opportunities for higher education and meaningful, rewarding occupations. Civil rights legislation helped level the occupational and social rights playing field in all of this, but times have changed quickly and dramatically.
As recently as a generation ago minorities could stand much taller on our social hierarchy. Many white males took offense at government's "equal opportunity" rules allowing these new social relations. In their turn, many members of minority groups found new opportunities for educational and occupational advancement; some white males saw this as "the luck of the Irish" placed upon other minority group members. That is, individual aspirations achieved by minorities occurred because of luck, not individual merit. ("The luck of the Irish is sarcasm, historically, meaning that the Irish seemed to invariably find bad luck in their way.)
With all these changing social relations, unemployment, alcoholism (especially alcoholism), drugs, poor education, and estrangement from friends and family, we find white male committing suicide. Most suicide cleanup practitioner's will verify my rough caricature, profile, for white male suicides, I'm more than sure.
Variations among white males will include youths committing suicide with bizarre, metaphysical notions about the nature of death; white male self-killing by accident while playing with guns or rifles; and suicide by older white males estranged from their social world and in ill health. This latter group strikes me as expected. World War veterans in ill health outlive their families and friends. Their health goes bad and gets worse with time. On their way out via suicide they take their lap dog with them. Kindly, a caricature of these suicides would find decedent's first placed a jacket or towel over their dog and then did the deed; next they take their own lives, and in as clean a manner as possible, given their conditions. I'm reminded, incidentally, of a nobleman's death and wish to have his horse destroyed following his death; it seems they may have wished no other to have an opportunity of abusing their horse.
Eddie Evans
- Ridiculous, unreasonable, unsound
- Meaningless, stupid, worthless activity
- Without reason, unequivocally irrational
- Weird, surreal (return)
Eddie Evans
Suicide Cleanup - Suicide Cleanup Continuation