On some issues just being to big

I got an email from a friend today asking me to join a group on Facebook asking me to support a campaign supporting "Assisted living" rather than supporting "assisted dieing /suicide" which has been in the news so much lately, particularly in relation to the Ray Gosling case. Although this has been in the news for quite some time as this radio piece by Baroness Campbell called "My right to live" illustrates.

I couldn't possibly consider blogging about this issue with out giving it a lot more thought, consideration and research. Instead I want to blog about why I found an invitation to this group so problematic.

I'm a member of all kinds of groups on Facebook from loving marmite to supporting the monks protests in Burma. I have never really minded much about what groups I've joined. But the issues relating to assisted suicide and what the concept says about society's attitude to disability is so huge and so complex I can't come down on one side or the other. And for me that is the whole point, it isn't about sides. There are disabled people who desperately want to end their lives, but can not do this for them selves and there are many disabled people who fervently believe that by recognizing assisted suicide, society is endorsing oppression of disabled people in the most extreme possible way.

Facebook and many other Internet hosted forum lend themselves well to presenting ideas in a focused and powerful manner or could that also be described as in a one sided and extreme manner? Communications on social networking sites are usually short, snappy and made often when someone is on the move, or doing two things at once. The best concentrated efforts of the group founders can be dashed by the people who join and post on that group. It is also easy for issues to be hi-jacked by people with a different agenda who piggy back on to an issue to propagate theirs. In the case of assisted suicide, many religious groups have strong feelings about suicide but don't necessarily share the disability equality aims of disability groups. This can lead to some uncomfortable bed fellows. I am minded of the anti pornography campaigning feminists who aligned themselves with religious groups who don't exactly embrace women's rights.

It was considering all of these factors which made me decide not to join my friends group on Facebook. The trouble is any campaign group I could support on the matter would have to be called something like:

"Society needs to do so much more to advance disabled people's human rights (including the right for disabled people to make their own decisions about life and death) we need to challenge and overturn the pervasive negative attitudes to disability and ensure that disabled people have equal rights and choices (including those that relate to life and ending life.)"

It just isn't very catchy for the Internet age is it?!