Katy, Bar the Door

This is a significant day. 

No, I’m not referring primarily to the 85th Academy Awards, although I’ve some thoughts on that given what happens tonight on teevee is light-years in importance – and 206 years in time – removed from a far more astoundingly significant, truly remarkable, history changing Oscar-worthy performance.

On the stage and under the spotlights this evening will be the actors honored for their re-enactments – facades and facsimiles – of people they’re not. “The Oscars (are) an absurd spectacle of remarkably successful people congratulating themselves for work that barely nudges at the borders of meaningful human achievement” – an apt description of Hollywood says New York Times guest columnist Adam Davidson.

The Oscars would simply be all so much glitz and glamour, just another night at the movies, were it not for what lies – and the lies – behind the curtain.

Nominated for five academy awards is “Amour,” a “twisted” recommendation indeed observed one reviewer who wrote: “For the record, taking a pillow and smothering your spouse is never ever a loving act. It is the opposite of a loving act. But the movie wants us to believe that pushing the last breath out of someone you love is compassion and mercy and heroism. It isn’t. It is a failure in every way in which one person could fail another.”

With “Amour,” we’re no longer pretending.  Life is ending because of the one taking, who – the cinema-creators would have you believe – is so-doing in an euthanasia-endorsing, brave-new-frontier-addressing, act of love: amour.

Near the other end of the age spectrum – and not, as yet, nominated for an award, in fact hardly meriting a headline much less a movie despite the fact it’s been legal for a decade – are the euthanized in Belgium where, interestingly as to timing given the Oscars and “Amour,” Belgian legislators opened a debate just this past Feb.20th to allow euthanasia to cover minors, the lawmakers “told by experts that it was already taking place.

“Anyway.”

Wesley J. Smith, who writes the column “Life and Dignity” for “The National Review Online” has this to say about that:

“Euthanasia guidelines are worse than meaningless, they are pretense. They exist to give the illusion of control. But once people come fully accept the premise of euthanasia–killing as a remedy for suffering–it’s Katy bar the door. That hasn’t happened yet in the USA. But if assisted suicide gets a firm grip here, it will.”

“Life and dignity,” to borrow from Smith’s column, are what motivated William Wilberforce to battle on behalf of blacks – slaves – who were set free in England by a vote of the House of Commons on this 24th day of February, 1807. 

Before we settle in our easy chair to watch who won what among actors – a spectacle in which, chances are, we will remember them less for what they accomplished than for what they wore, and in the process exposed, the Grammy’s having issued a memo this year asking attendees to adhere to a dress code banning “obscene activity” - it is more than headline noteworthy to observe the Academy Award undertaking of one who has come to be known as the “Hero for Humanity” especially given the never-easy-effort-required-to-accomplish-anything-worthy obstacles he had to overcome.  

“Any change in the institution of slavery,” wrote historian Kevin Belmonte (“Hero for Humanity”), “would wreck the national economy and the British way of life.  Lord Rodney warned of losing commerce to the French.  He argued that regulating the slave trade might weaken Britain’s hold on the West Indies.  He also said he 'had never heard of a slave being cruelly treated in all the time he had been in the West Indies, and expressed his wish that English laborers might be but half as happy.’”

“Culture of can’t” – or in Wilberforce’s Britain: ‘won’t’ - is the title of an editorial in "The Desert News” out of Salt Lake City this February 23rd.  “Inertia is the driving force in most large bureaucracies, and there can be unpleasant consequences for those who dare to do things differently from the way they have always been done.”

Wilberforce was to discover in abundant measure just how unpleasant the consequences would be – to challenge the status quo; to upset the economic applecart; to rock the world of those basking in the benefits of slave ownership, all undertaken not to win a gold statue or strut across a stage but to champion a cause unparalleled in history pursuing what was just, noble and right, “living for something greater than himself”: his fellow human beings.