What Kind of Change Do You Want?
In the 2008 primaries change became a focus. It was a refreshing focus until one realized that just change alone is not enough. What change were we talking about? There is good change and bad change and a variety of opinions in between.
In 1949 Dr. Leo Alexander, U.S. consultant to the Nuremberg trials, wrote: “It is the first seemingly innocent step away from principle that frequently decides a career of crime. Corrosion begins in microscopic proportions.”
How could a civilized nation like Germany escalate killing until a whole race was almost exterminated? The Jews were not physically defective or mentally retarded or terminally ill. They were just Jews. And that was all they had to be to become the focus of Hitler’s extermination plan. He paved the way in his countrymen’s mind one small step at a time. Forced sterilization. Forced abortion. Medical experimentation. Euthanasia. Genocide.
A similar process is at work in our country. Yesterday it was abortion. Today the issues are doctor-assisted suicide or voluntary euthanasia and infanticide. What will it be tomorrow? Is this the change we want?
What tolerance of medicalized killing does to people who permit it is perhaps more frightening than even the killing itself. When my life is so valuable to me that I have to kill others to be able to afford it or use dead babies to prolong it, then I have cheapened its value. What a far cry such an attitude is from Jesus’ ideal of giving one’s life to save the lives of others. The ideal of giving one’s life for another, whether on the battlefield or in heroic rescue attempts or in the home, has kept us a nation worthy of respect. But who will respect a nation of people who willingly sacrifice the lives of others so that they themselves might live?