How Much is Life Worth?

Zefram CochraneHow Much is Life Worth?
by Saab Lofton

"Reverence for life affords me my fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, assisting, and enhancing life and that to destroy, harm, or to hinder life is evil."
--Albert Schweitzer

In the movie, Star Trek: First Contact, a scientific genius by the name of broke the light barrier -- just as Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in 1947 -- and Humanity was finally able to colonize other worlds as a result. This meant the Human race could hump and spit out youngins to its heart's content -- secure in the knowledge that once one planet became overpopulated, we the people would simply hop in a faster-than-light starship and settle down on another.

Unfortunately, N.A.S.A. is a far cry from Gene Roddenberry's Starfleet (Hell, some folks actually believe the 1969 moon landing was an elaborate farce), so where does that leave us?

I've been telling fools for years that God created homosexuality in order to keep Charlton Heston's Soylent Green (a dystopic flick from 1973 about overpopulation in the future) from becoming a reality, but the homophobic Religious Right has a MUCH bigger audience than I do (free speech ain't just a quality, it's also a QUANTITY) and gays are CONstantly told to have families befitting a 1950s sitcom ...

... also too, despite the success of golf champ Tiger Woods or Oscar winner Halle Berry, white supremacists are STILL unconvinced that mixed blooded progeny can handle the reins of power. Therefore, all too many whites work overtime to keep from being bred out by having as many kids as possible when they could just as soon adopt one of the MANY discarded brown-skinned children across the so-called third world (check out the favelas of Brazil to see what I mean).

All this has made me wonder whether the lack of free, universal health care is some sick form of population control? According to Steve Sternberg from U.S.A. Today (05/22/2002), "More than 18,000 adults in the U.S.A. die each year because they are uninsured and can't get proper health care."

According to Joshua Holland, editor and senior writer at AlterNet, "In its 2002 report, the Institute of Medicine estimated that 18,000 adults nationwide died in 2000 because they did not have health insurance. That estimate was later updated by the Urban Institute, which reported that at least 22,000 adults died in 2006 due to a lack of health insurance."

And according to John Pilger, one of the most acclaimed journalists of all time, "More than 24,000 children die every day from the effects of poverty."

Bust out your calculator and do the math -- I guarantee yo' ass neither al-Qaeda nor Saddam Hussein ever killed that many people, so tell your conservative brother-in-law at the Thanksgiving Dinner that Saab Lofton said to SUCK IT! To paraphrase those old kung fu movies, "Your threat assessment is really quite pathetic!"

And yet, what difference does it make? What's the point of saving lives by sharing the white man's wealth as Robin Hood would if there's no place to put the living? I wholeheartedly agree with the esteemed physicist, Professor Stephen Hawking: "The Human race has no future if it doesn't go into space. I therefore want to encourage public interest in space." That's why I'm a Trekkie for life.

Feminists often claim that -- if women were actually in charge of their bodies -- then they could better regulate how many newborns there were. Fair enough, but I don't see too much being done about the women who define themselves BY giving birth instead of judging their lives by how much of a difference they've made (Xena, NOT Barbie!). Maybe the practice of throwing celebratory baby showers should be suspended until after a real life equivalent of Zefram Cochrane hits the scene. And please, doN'T say that the very next scion might be The One who cracks the secret of interstellar travel -- not when y'all could donate the quarter-of-a-million-dollars it takes to raise a babe to the United Negro College Fund and help a brothah/sistah become an astronaut!

How much is a Human life worth? Well, there's a line in Huey Newton's poem, Revolutionary Suicide, that goes like this: "By having no family I have inherited the family of Humanity." That accounts for my stance against the death penalty and why I'm for free, universal health care (I'd even be pro-life were it not for those inbred imbeciles who insist that women carry babies to term but lack the class consciousness to acknowledge that a parent's bills MUST be paid).

The ship Zefram Cochrane flew in First Contact was called The Phoenix, so let's all hope/wish/pray that someone builds something similiar and soon. At last count, the Earth's population was fast approaching seven billion, and despite the hate-filled ravings of FOX News, Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth won an Oscar AND a Nobel Peace Prize FOR A REASON. If Human life is in fact priceless, then ACT like it!

SOURCES:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverence_for_Life
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_First_Contact
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/healthcare/2002-05-22-insurance-deat...
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/81895/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Pilger#Awards
http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=503
http://web.archive.org/web/20070504171857/http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/s...
http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/CollegeAndFamily/RaiseKids/RaisingY...
http://www.pbs.org/hueypnewton/huey/huey_poetry.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Inconvenient_Truth#Awards