Writing Response

I've been reading some older stuff lately. One such piece was “A Case of Assisted Suicide” by Jack Kevorkian. I thought I'd write a response about that article.

In the United States alone, more than 39,000 people commit suicide in 2010, according to statistics from the CDC, and the sad part is that ten times that attempt to exterminate themselves from existence—but fail.

This percent of the people will usually end up getting help (which is a good), because most of the time it is over things that can be mended back together or helped—relationships, drug addictions, and other little things. 

Kevorkian’s main purpose is to help the people that are terminally ill, and have doctored to find that nothing will cure their illness.  These type of people do not want and deserve to suffer in agonizing pain for the rest of their days.

I can see the point of these people, because I would not want to suffer and only have reassurance that there is no hope of a cure available.  However, there is a fine line dividing between the people that need his kind of help, and the people that just need to live there lives. 

An example of this is schizophrenic people they have hope, because there is now antipsychotic drugs that control these people.  When you compare that to Alzheimer’s disease there is no cure and if you know that you can not be cured all hope is lost.

Unlike the 300,000 that try killing themselves for minute reasons, Kevorkian determines if the person should require his services. So he speaks with the doctors that the patient is doctoring with, and observes them for quite a while before he will commit to his services. 

Also, throughout this essay he comes across as a kind gentle person showing that he operates on a different wavelength than the rest of the world. 

Much like Martin Luther King did by sacrificing his own well being for his beliefs.  Kevorkian also stands behind what he believes, because otherwise he would not be being tried for murder just to help someone out of there agonizing misery.   

His extremely large vocabulary makes this piece more convincing, because it makes it seem that there is no doubt at all that he does not know what he is doing.

The chronological order of this essay adds to his idea as being portrayed as a kind, gentle person, because he could have described in detail what exactly took place in his van.

However, he probably would have disgusted the reader, and tricked them into thinking that he is truly a disturbed person.  Even as far into detail in the end of this essay that he went, I do not think that he is completely truthful about how smooth it goes.

I saw a T.V. program years ago that showed his entire process, and the individual was told that it would take no longer than ten minutes. 

Something went wrong with the machine and the victim laid suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning before they actually passed away. 

His idea is to help people out of there misery, but if he is going to keep rendering his services he should keep with his promise—not a slow painful death much like there are enduring now.