At least once, when I was a young cub in my teens, my father said “You should always take people one at a time.” I don’t recall exactly what he said after that to expound on that thought, but the message I got was “Don’t prejudge based on the group someone is in (jock, nerd, black, brown); get to know them as an individual.” It must’ve worked because I went on to have a wide variety of friends, starting with my best friend in high school who was Cape Verdean. (Cape Verde is an island off the coast of northwest Africa. Its inhabitants are a mix of African, Creole, and Portuguese/European.)
It wasn’t until much later in life that I understood how profound that statement was, how foundational to the American experiment. It was something Jefferson might say or any one of a number of our Founders. Our Constitution is all about the individual, the value and dignity of the individual. The primacy of the individual.
That’s why it’s so disturbing to see the cultural Marxism, the rot, the utter stench of it, infiltrating our culture. These collectivists are missing the both the micro and the macro of why our Great Charter is the bedrock of Liberty both here and throughout the world.
Without a whole, unreserved investment in the value of the individual, one cannot appropriately place value on that one life. Without the ability to appropriately place value on one life, one cannot appropriately place value on life itself.
Conservatives don’t need to be told that once you stop valuing the individual, bad things happen. Valuing life itself is the inevitable corollary to valuing the individual, and I don’t mean just the unborn but the life of the born and living. When one values each individual — when one takes people one at a time and not in groups — rooted within that is the estimation that that one life, indeed all life, is intrinsically valuable and precious.
When one stops doing that, evil flows from it. When entire cultures stop doing that, evil flows from it in quantity.
Canada and China are currently giving us examples of this evil. First, China:
The cut off text reads:
of the CCP’s state organ harvesting operation.
One victim was just 17 years old.
“Since he was under 18, his parents spent about 10,000 Chinese yuan to get him into the army, and hoped he could get a better job opportunity in the future.”
“Because he was from the countryside, he didn’t know how to please or bribe his supervisor.”
“He got [in] a conflict with his officer and was put into a military jail.”
“His blood type matched that of a high-level military officer, so the army decided to kill this boy for his two kidneys and one eyeball.”
“His parents will probably never know what happened to their kid.”
Now to Canada, who isn’t far behind China on its death curve.
Some of us warned that it would be a very short drive from what Canada is doing with its state-assisted suicide, to the what the CCP is doing with organ-harvesting. A very short drive. Well, here we go. Check out this law from New Brunswick.
This is what it looks like when a western nation stops valuing the individual. In stark relief.
The cut off text reads:
death has not yet occurred if:
(a) in the opinion of a physician the death of the person is imminent by reason of injury or disease”
You don’t need to be dead to have your organs harvested.
And who do you think will be carved up while still not dead? The most vulnerable people of society with no voice in the hospital to protect them.
It doesn’t take much to imagine this happening, as a version of this has already happened. One elderly woman was killed because of “caretaker burnout.” Now while her organs weren’t harvested, the reason she was euthanized under Canada’s MAID law should alarm us all. If “caretaker burnout” is all it takes to take someone’s life — against their will — then other “vulnerable people of society with no voice in the hospital to protect them” are surely next. Vulnerable people with valuable organs.
You can just hear the excuses, can’t you? “Quality of life.” “Save the living who have a chance to have a quality of life.” Imagine someone in a wheelchair who requires constant care but who is young and has healthy organs. Their caretaker is no doubt exhausted, but this young person has 30, 40, 50 or more years left to live. You can imagine the heartbreak, the desperation, the appeal to the medical professionals in a Canadian hospital.
They say that once you kill the first time, it becomes easier the second time… and the third, etc.
Our neighbor to the north is going to a very dark place, and all because they stopped taking — and valuing — one person at a time.
M. Walter blogs at www.mwalterwriter.com