Without getting into the morality of the appalling and disgusting act of suicide (oops), whether you support it or not, how is avoiding discomfort and avoiding turning ugly a "brave" thing to do? On its own, avoiding discomfort is not bad thing, so long as you are not using immoral means, like murdering someone in order to do it, or avoiding an obligation. But it is not heroic, either. Avoiding pain and suffering is pretty much always the path of least resistance, which is about as opposite of heroic as you can get without being murderous.
Now when it comes to suicide, many people will disagree with me on many aspects of it. I even dislike movies where people kill themselves to avoid capture, kill themselves to comply with a code of honor, kill themselves to prevent someone else from committing a murder, kill themselves to prevent the enemy from obtaining information from them, kill themselves so as not to be a burden to their comrades' survival, kill themselves because they have been bitten by the undead and are about to become an undead monster themselves, or prepare to kill themselves to donate a heart or other organ to a deathly ill child. You are not God. It is not your call to make.
Hollywood might be a depraved sinkhole of degenerate philosophy that wouldn't know morality or grasp the importance of life if clubbed over the head with a physical representation of either abstract concept, but they are not totally stupid when it comes to pandering to people's emotions for money, so the very existence of movies and TV shows with all those situations suggests lots of people feel differently than I. Okay, fine. I can deal with there being wrong people out there, I've been doing it for over three decades.
But we can't discuss our opinions of issues or communicate meaningfully in any way if we cannot speak the same language. Part of the whole concept of languages is agreement about the meaning of words. You cannot take words with a positive connation and expand their definitions to include something you approve of.
You can applaud Brittany Maynard (or Robin Williams or any other such high-profile person who is eternally flipping us the bird) all you want, and I won't lose any sleep over it, but you cannot call her "brave" because you like her and you like that word, and you want to get them together. Choosing to suffer less is a self-evident, self-rewarding decision. It is not brave. It is not noble. It is not heroic. It is self-serving at best. If I am right, and it is, in fact, morally wrong to kill yourself, especially without a significant non-selfish reason, then that "choice" becomes the opposite of brave. It becomes cowardly. Cowardice is shirking an obligation or committing an immoral act out of fear or in anticipation of negative personal conseqences, such as pain, embarassment or financial loss.
So what part of dignity includes making a self-serving choice that is at best, tolerable, and at worst, sheer cowardice? Is it "dignified" because you're still pretty? Is it dignified because you have more money when you go? Remember when the spokesmen of the left railed against that sort of shallow priorities and materialism? Now they applaud the abandonment of loved ones in an act of violence, who once marched under the banner of "make love, not war".
And if a cancer patient in her prime, who from what I have read of her comments, has not YET suffered from her illness, is brave and dignified precisely because she is going to kill herself, why then do we call gross, bald, pukey people who are suffering and fighting for their lives brave? If they are actually "brave" wouldn't they have checked out Maynard-style before letting it get to that point? To call both cases brave is saying that both the soldier who charges at the enemy, and the one who flees the battlefield are brave. Even without saying which choice is right and which is wrong, it is impossible to call two such opposed courses of action "brave". They are not both heroic.
Also, not that this is relevant in the abstract, but doing anything in the face of an outpouring of public applause and encouragement automatically renders suspect any assessment that such action is brave. It might be acceptable. It might be something that people really would like to see happen. But widespread approval removes at least one possible negative consequence the person in question might have to face, and makes the choice easier. Easy choices are not a feature of brave actions.
Regardless of one's opinion of an action, how about we at least agree to call a spade a spade?
And once you're on the suicide train, fully on it. Do you consider things, like not just how. but who...Who is going to have the displeasure of finding you, and in what state. depending on how you choose to leave this earthly realm? B/c once you are on that west bound train, It's all shades of bad, and I think you've not only stopped caring for yourself but your friends and family. They are the ones left to pick up the pieces.
