Light for the Loveless
Bright Valley of Love by Edna Hong
reviewed by Rebekah Curtis
An AP news story on euthanasia in Canada, posted on August 11, 2022, recently caught Twitter’s attention for a moment. Several patients told of being coerced toward ending their own lives, among them Roger Foley, who has a degenerative brain disorder. An Ontario hospital ethicist initiated a conversation with Foley focusing on the cost of extended hospital care, which would be “north of $1,500 a day.”
Foley’s testimony calls to mind a scene from Roberto Benigni’s 1997 film Life Is Beautiful:
School Principal: Listen to this problem. I remember it because it shocked me. A lunatic costs the state four marks a day. A cripple, four and a half marks. An epileptic, three marks and a half. Considering that the average is four marks a day and there are 300,000 patients, how much would the state save if these individuals were eliminated?
Dora: I can’t believe this.
Principal: That was my exact reaction. I can’t believe a seven-year-old child has to solve this kind of equation. It’s a difficult calculation. Proportions, percentages. They need at least some algebra to do those equations. That’s high-school material for us [in Italy].
Rodolfo: 300,000 times four. If we killed them all, we’d save 1,200,000 marks a day.
Principal: Exactly. Bravo! But you’re an adult. They make seven-year-old children do this in Germany! It’s truly another race.
Benigni’s framing of the principal’s shock is heavily ironic. But the present time reveals that we should not be sure of humanity’s native ability to recognize irony. For all the comfort that comes from having the Nazis to refer to as a bulwark of evil, many are failing to notice how much our own ethical guides have come to sound like them. Unmarked by suspicious goose-stepping and salutes, quantifiers of human worth can declare exactly whose maintenance is net beneficial and whose isn’t.
Two Contrasting Pictures
Rebekah Curtis is the co-author of LadyLike (Concordia, 2015), and her essays have appeared in Touchstone, Chronicles, Salvo, Modern Reformation, and Lutheran Forum, among other publications. She attends a congregation of the LCMS.
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on Reading Don Quixote in Its Original Christian Context by Luis Cortest
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