Edit: Thanks to all the folks taking the time to read through this and correct my thinking. I’m seeing how I wound myself up into a kinda toxic headspace and appreciate the hand out of it.
Context: I spent way too much time on Reddit this week getting into dustups with people blaming Dearborn, Michigan for everything that’s wrong in the world. Turns out I’m too much of a pugilist to agitate correctly and I’m stuck unable to metabolize my disappointment that the libs are refusing to learn anything. I’ll get through it. Anyway, one of the discussions centered around users giving up their organ donor status because they don’t want their organs going to Trump voters.
My initial reaction was that it was spiteful and petty as fuck to rescind your organ donor status over an election not going your way*, and if I’d had more patience and less moral outrage I probably could’ve come up with some sort of clever observation that folks who were okay with waiting until after an election for meaningful action to be taken on a genocide were clearly okay with instrumentalizing the lives of others to achieve an outcome, so maybe they were throwing stones from inside a glass house. But, as I chewed on that argument a little more, I started to wonder. I didn’t really reflect a whole lot on checking the organ donor box; as a materialist I’m assuming I’m not going to need my organs if I meet an untimely demise and it makes sense to let someone else have them if they can do some good; ethics committees exist to make sure they’ll be put to good use. But , at the same time, an ethics committee signed off on a heart for Dick Cheney, a man so famously heartless he couldn’t even be bothered to properly thank the family of the kid whose heart he received. If I could add a clause to my organ donor registry excluding Dick Cheney from my organ donation, I would, even if the odds of him continuing to power his unholy grasp on life with my kidneys are astronomically low. If there’s anyone in this world who’s less entitled to even the organs he grew himself, it’s him.
And over the last year I’ve developed a pretty deep pessimism about Americans in general. I stupidly thought we’d learned as a country from the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan and those of us who hadn’t become irremediable chuds could be more thoughtful in the wake of October 7th, but nope, even the progressives bayed for more blood. If there’s one thing I’ve seen in the wake of the election, it’s that the people who care are an unwelcome minority.
I know it’s not everyone and that I’ve probably done myself no favors with the amount of time I’ve spent online since COVID started, but I feel like I’m trapped in a death cult and it seems perverse to allow my body to continue it even after I’ve died. I’m considering withdrawing my organ donor registration and willing my body to science instead.
tl;dr: you can’t have my lungs unless you can recite The Internationale
*Side note: one thing I’ve discovered is that libs who are loudly proclaiming that they’re done helping anyone who didn’t vote for Kamala Harris is to express the hope that they don’t find themselves in need of help only to find it similarly conditioned. They all assume they’re going to be fine and the one in position to lend support and to imply the possibility of the inverse can lead to some really, really angry reactions.
To condense my thoughts on the matter, I’m wondering about what it means to be an organ donor in a society that seems radically (and perhaps increasingly) out of step with your personal values. Is it enough to know we’re providing a benefit to a few individuals or should we consider what it means to have your tissues continuing on in the world after your death?
This feels like you’re approaching all of this from a weirdly moralist and antimaterialist perspective. Zoom out for a second. You realize fascists will receive socialized medicine, too, right? When we create a better world, men who battered their wives and grew old in society that applauded them for it will die dignified deaths in socialist society. War criminals who got PTSD from shooting mothers around their children will receive psychiatric care.
That’s just the nature of social change. The atrocities of our epoch are just Tuesday for our grandparents. The profoundly sick, alienating, and dysfunctional society we wish to improve is made up from sick, alienated, and dysfunctional people. That’s who we’re counting on to realize they have to join us in revolutionary struggle, sadly. It’s justifiable that you feel that helping fascists in any way is repugnant. But the sad reality is, any social change we wanna achieve isn’t gonna happen because 1% of people that are perfect socialists vanguardists just will it into happening; we need a mass movement full of those same people. You gotta be ready to see them getting your help. That’s just how it is.
Yeah, I guess I’m just struggling with the hypocrisy of a society that respects the sanctity of our choices when asking us how we want to dispose of our remains but makes broad exceptions for that sanctity when it comes to the other or the marginalized and to see broad social support for those exceptions in things like the indifference to Palestinian suffering and the defeat of the initiative to outlaw prison slavery in California. Being encouraged to remember the goal of doing the most good with what we have and that we can’t make the changes we need on a foundation of misanthropy has helped.