From: utzoo!decvax!genrad!mit-eddi!hammy
Newsgroups: net.suicide
Title: Continuing a lengthy flame
Article-I.D.: mit-eddi.109
Posted: Tue Apr 12 14:42:12 1983
Received: Wed Apr 13 19:20:28 1983

I don't know how many other people were interested, but I want to say
congratulations to Alan S. Watt for a really great article.  For a long
while I thought net.suicide had done itself in with all the random
tirades.  I would like to toss in a little imput about my feelings, and
perhaps I could expound on some of the points Alan has brought up that
are relative to my life.

    Now when someone commits suicide, they have asserted an answer to that
    question: "there is none".  The rest of us either have to agree with
    the suicide, and kill ourselves as well, or we have to dispute the act,
    which requires that we provide a different answer.
    
    Well, what is the meaning of life?  Why are we here?  What is our
    purpose and destiny?
    
       "Well, er, ... I ummm, well I get by, sort of ..."
    
    You see?  The act of suicide forces each of us to try to come up with a
    reason for living, which makes uncomfortable;  we would rather ignore
    the issue, and continue to "get by".
    
    A person confiding an intent to suicide is even more unkind;  you have
    only the choices of doing nothing and allowing that person to die, or
    trying based on your own life to prove that life IS worth living.
    Well? can you justify your life?

I consider my primary purpose in life is to help make the world a better
place to live in.  Since I am not in some kind of professional social
work, I have to do this more or less as an "extracurricular activity".
I think it is a justifiable purpose, and it gives me a goal that I will
never have to worry about achieving too soon.
	
As far as personal responsibilities, this involves developing my talents
as well as I can, including gaining as much wisdom as I can in my short
life.  As far as responsibilities to other people, I feel an obligation
to devote a large amount of my time to helping other people in various
ways.  

One of the ways I try to help people is listening.  By listening, I do
not mean trying to absorb myself in the soap opera of their lives,
rather, trying to grasp the drama and feeling that is being unfolded to
me.  I try to hear the ideas that they would impart on my consciousness.
I think this listening can help a person feel less lonely, and does not
have to be done within an intimate relationship.

Coupled with this listening is a desire to understand how the person is
and feels, to empathize with their situation.  At some point, if I can
understand them, and if they want it to be, I try to help them with a
problem that is bothering them.

Along with this philosophy are many difficulties and codes of ethics.
Dome of the codes I have taken from religeon, and surprisingly, some I
have taken from science fiction.  One example is the "Prime Directive";
not trying cause a change in (a person), but to let that change occur
naturally.  

    I think it's very much too bad this newsgroup has been so dominated by
    people who will not address the questions suicide purports to answer.
    Perhaps the electronic medium is just too impersonal to allow people to
    express (expose?) themselves this way.  Or perhaps it's just that so
    many people have lost faith in themselves because the world they live
    in seems so complex and unreasonable.

As far as the impersonality of the network, I think net.suicide faces a
unique problem that if any close feeling s are expressed, the person
expressing them stands a good chance of being harrassed by some of the
less responsable readers.  Suicide (and personal interation, for that
matter) is a very emotional subject and people have various means for
dealing with these feelings, as you have already itemized.  I am not
afraid of bein harassed myself, I would attribute any senseless
harrassment as a reflection of the problems of the harrasser.  If I am
to be countered on my points for their own merit, I would listen to the
other person's perspective.

    I know I have a strong inhibition against sharing experiences from my
    life, feeling it's "none of their business".  However, having thrown
    down the gauntlet, I feel obligated to be the first one to pick it up.
    
I too, feel in general, that it is no ones business how another person
feels or how they have lived their life, unless they choose to share it.
I personally choose to share any part of my life that a person would ask
of me, as long as it does not conflict with any trust relationships that
I have built up with other people.  I have picked up my gauntlet when I
found out how much love I had for other people, and how much love they
could have for me.
    
    Well, I'll leave you with a thought I once had:
    
    	If medicine, or psychiatry could somehow restore faith in life
    	to those who lacked it, then that same technology could take
    	it away from those who had it.
    
To close, I have found that faith can be even stronger stuff than life
itself.  I have heard of many deadly poisons for the body, but I have
always marveled at how faith seemed to be so much more durable.

						The Eternal Optimist &
						The Incorrigible Romantic
						J. Scott Hamilton
						decvax!genrad!mit-eddie