They Argued About Whether He Was Worth Saving

Almost a month ago, I wrote about the effect on a person’s psyche of being raised in a home which places no value on a human life. Now imagine for a moment the effect of being raised in a society which doesn’t value human life. How would that person behaved when faced with a life or death decision about another human being? Would he save them, or measure the value and convenience of that life first? Sadly, we have our answer.

Two EMT’s in England answered it for us when they responded to the call of a disabled man who was having a heart attack. When they saw Mr Baker sprawled on the floor and his crutches lying nearby, they did not rush to save him. Instead, they stood nearby and debated the quality of his life and whether, considering the drain he was on the national health care system, he and the country would be better off if Mr Baker were simply allowed to die.

It would seem that in secular England, these two public servants decided that because Mr Baker’s hips were bad (he’d had surgery for them) enough to require the use of crutches and his house was dirty, they would just tell the dispatcher that he was already dead when they arrived. His life was probably miserable and he wasn’t worth the effort of resuscitation. Unfortunately for the ambulancemen, they didn’t realize that the 999 (the equivalent of our 911) computer was still taping since Mr Baker hadn’t hung up the phone when he collapsed. Every word of their debate was saved.

What kind of society breeds people who stand over a dying man and decide that his life is too pathetic for him to want to live it? A society who does not value the worth of the individual as being on par or more important than the collective good. This is the path that our country is headed down if we do not realize the psychological impact that our actions have upon our children and take drastic moves to change them.

Let this tragic tale be a lesson to us all. When people are raised in a society which teaches and believes that only the convenient are worthy of life, then one day the inconvenient could be any of us. There is none of us so special that the EMT’s wouldn’t fell free to debate the relative merits of our lives before deciding if we are worth the effort.