When Are We Dead?

This used to be a fairly easy question, although sometimes we got it wrong based on scratches on coffin lids.

It’s harder these days when one considers ventilators, artificial hearts, pacemakers, etc.  It’s actually a much debated question in medicine and philosophy (areas that I love).

I live considerably in both my brain and body.  I completed my MD degree and am working on my MA degree in bioethics.  If my higher brain function stopped and I could no longer participate in those worlds I would consider myself dead and be unwilling to continue and pissed off if I were forced to.  I live extensively in my body too.  I’m reminded of a couple of lines from a movie where one said that he treats his body like a temple and the other say’s “and I treat mine like an amusement park.”  Yep, even though I can still get into clothes I wore in high school, I treat my body like an amusement park.

I believe I’ve blogged on this point before: I have instructed my wife that the first time I shit in my pants I want her to get a gun and shoot me, and that she loves me so much and is so intent on fulfilling my wishes that every time I break wind she grabs a gun and checks my drawers.

If I could not think or recognize those around me, or if my body disintegrated into something which only kept my brain alive I would consider myself to be dead.

When would you be dead?

BRATTLEBORO, Vermont (Reuters) - A Vermont town that is gaining national
attention for brash displays of nudity -- from teens in the buff to naked
elderly people -- awoke on Wednesday to an emergency ban on nakedness in most
public places.

Officials in Brattleboro voted 3 to 2 on Tuesday night for a temporary
30-day ordinance prohibiting people from going about in the nude.

Public nudity made headlines last summer when the weather grew hot and a
couple of dozen teens took to holding hula hoop contests, riding bikes and
parading past stores wearing only their birthday suits. The disrobing has
resumed this summer.  

 http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN1823185120070718

I have mixed feelings about this. 
First of all, I can’t imagine living in a town that believes in personal
freedom so much that the city council would be so evenly divided as to whether
strolling around in the buff should be limited. 
I wish I lived in such a progressive town.  In this part of Indiana I’m pretty sure that
breast feeding in public is against the law. 
After Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” during the Super Bowl one
mother wrote a letter to the editor asking how she would ever be able to undo
the damage done to her children by seeing that breast.  (Yes, it’s true, though I suspect that most
any damage done to her children has actually been done by her).

Before I had my own pool in the middle of 58 acres I would have loved for
there to be a local pool where I could have gone skinny dipping, which is still
legal in Brattleboro.

Still, I can understand why perhaps some might not want people strolling
nude in the middle of downtown.  It
wouldn’t bother me any more than someone strolling in a really bad paisley jumpsuit
or a man in bad golf attire.  But I’m
probably weird in that way.  I really
wouldn’t care, but I can see how some might.

What I think is really cool though, is that it was teenagers that initiated
this.  These are rebellious teenagers in
the fashion that teenagers were rebellious in the late 60’s and early 70’s.  For the most part, it seems to me that the
youth of today have lost that real rebellious spirit.  It’s much safer to go along, don’t challenge
authority, don’t challenge the mainstream middle of the road, stay safe, stay
comfortable, don’t risk losing your cell phone or PS3.

Hermann Hesse wrote: “The bourgeois prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience
to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to the deathly inner consuming fire”.  I kind of like the heat of the fire and I’m
really happy to see that rebellion is still alive in teenagers.  Maybe they’ll even stand up and challenge our
emperor’s clothing one day. 

There are oftentimes we wonder if we've ever done anything good in our lives.  Today, during a time when honeybees are disappearing from our country, I took this picture of one of my girls (all field bees are female) working a sunflower in a sunflower field I planted this year.

I'm a beekeeper.  That's one good thing.