September 14, 2005

Having to drown like a rat  

When I heard that a large number of people had died in a nursing home, I wasn't surprised because I had also heard (on television) a story about a nursing home staff that had to abandon half the residents after repeated and failed attempts to get the authorities (whoever they were or should have been) to send help. In that case there were 70 patients, 35 of whom were left to die, apparently to save the other 35. The numbers in these two stories fit together, but there's no mention in the Guardian of patients who survived at St Rita's, so I'm not sure whether I've heard two sides of the same story or two different stories.

Meanwhile there's this disturbing story about a hospital where some patients were (arguably) euthanized by doctors who felt they could not make it out alive. Obviously the decisions that had to be made were unthinkable, and my inclination is to give doctors the benefit of the doubt. Still, the article is strangely incomplete. I'm still confused after reading a couple times through what the specific justification was for euthanizing these patients -- was it the inability to evacuate, the lack of power, the armed gangs looting the pharmacy?

It's hard to know what to make of these stories, in part because the details aren't clear, in part because it's so hard to imagine the horrors of these circumstances. What is clear is that the breakdown of law and order wasn't limited to people who were looting grocery stores and Wal-Marts. Good people in every context imaginable had to make decisions that stretched the bounds of morality. It's going to be difficult in the aftermath to reach any kind of legal or social resolution that scans with our everyday experience.

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