Like any good stage play, life is a study in counter-point. Sun and rain, growth and decline, beauty and ugliness. One of the more complex is the way we are scripted to enter and leave the stage....!
Women first entered as the wily Eves, Bathshebas and Cleopatras. Starting with the Greeks, while never allowed real equality, they became the object of enormous artistic devotion. Right into the 19th and early 20th centuries when this devotion stuck them on Victorian and Gibson Girl pedestals, safely removed from the smarmy levers of male power.
However, roles began shifting in the popular culture with the Flappers of the 20s, the Hollywood divas like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford of the 30s, gradually Rosie the Riveter and the Emancipated Woman in the wake of World War II. The dewy dressed-not-slacked Doris Days, Lucys and June Cleavers of the last great male age are now remembered (missed?) as historical specimens along the female ascent.
But if the way our species enters on stage has had a zig-zaggy history, leaving it is a new history in the making. With so many hospitals informally abetting assisted suicide, it doesn't take a Dr. Kevorkian or TV's Nurse Jackie to report old ethics are starting to yield to new exigencies.
For the average price of a wake ($9300), anyone who qualifies can be peacefully and chemically walked off stage by the staff at Dignitas in Zurich Switzerland. Similar opportunities legally exist in Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and in the states of Washington and Oregon.
The accepted exit door is the one marked "terminal illness," and sufferers by the growing thousands are taking it. For those of us still in the audience, this is a chance to study the script and ask ourselves: What playwright has written these entrances and exits? Biologists and believers often read it very differently. Leaving it for us to choose between them.
Oh, unless it's already our cue!
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WOW!!! You're right, when the cue comes, what to do about it???
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