Suicide Is Not Merely A Matter Of "Rights"

SINCE I'VE NEVER had the experience of not being from a large, very close family I don't know how often one of the down sides of that comes for those who aren't from a family like mine.  The down side is that you are far more likely to experience things that may never happen in a smaller, less closely connected family, addiction of those you love and are obligated to try to help, addiction leading to long prison terms, deaths from terrible diseases of those you have an obligation to care for and now in my family the suicide by a young person whose motive was depression.  I got that news this morning.

Despite what that "stupidest song ever written" claims, suicide isn't painless, it isn't victimless, I would count many of those who go through with it or try to were likely victims of the romanticization and, yes, promotion of it through literature, through pop culture, through the idiocy that has peddled it as some kind of political cause, a "right" - I may try to discern the history of that promotion as a modern cause and virtue, testing my suspicion that it may largely be yet another distortion of "liberalism" under secularism, just to say what I will have to overcome in order to tell the truth if it doesn't turn out to be that.  I've mentioned before one of those Fred Friendly round table things in which a congressman I admire, Barney Frank got into it with one I despised and still do, Henry Hyde, in which Barney Frank responded to Hyde's "right to life" language by asking where that "right" resided if not in the individual who wanted to end his own life.  Which is an excellent political and legal and logical argument if you want to argue for the decriminalization of suicide, which I'm neither entirely against nor for, nor easy about as it is happening in various places.  I can easily see the "right" to end your life being turned into an obligation under economic or other coercive force or through the encouragement of commercial "culture".  

The matter of an "obligation" of those who are expensive through their needs to live or through inconvenience to other people who need to care for them has given me another issue that, much as I respect Frank and much as I despise the memory of Hyde, might be a more moral and responsible way to address it.  Far from being an individual right exercised by an autonomous individual, the results of suicide, especially that of a young person, a young adult in this case, is not confined to that person.  One of my brothers asked me not to let his children know because one of them is very depressed and stressed right now and he worries about the effect of the news on her - perhaps those in a small family who are not close wouldn't get that.  It is known that one suicide in a community, at a school, will lead to others.  The most famous literary double-suicide of Romeo and Juliette is an example of that - I fucking hate that play and not only because I've read and seen it too often.  I think teaching that in school is a big mistake, West Side Story is an even stupider replacement because it lacks any literary merit contained in the play. The depravity of online life has led to evil people setting up others for suicide for the gratification of those who set them up when they carry through on it and a myriad of other depraved expressions of "freedom" "liberty" and "The fucking First Amendment" as the depravity that "rights" talk can easily turn to.

I think considering suicide in terms of the pain, the possible life ending pain that it causes to others, considering THAT as a real life consequence of a suicide should be stressed at least as much as the "right" to autonomy imagined by the champions of suicide, though how you gain or exercise autonomy by ending your possibility of autonomy is something I'd like to ask them to explain.   The obligation that the suicide has to other people who they will harm by the act should at least be fully discussed and popularized as a way of thinking about it.