Kill Zone

As at least thirty-four former New Orleans inhabitants would tell you if they could, hospitals are deadly places.

According to both the New York Times and CNN, in the week following the hurricane ten people out of the 24,000 person population in the Superdome died. The New Orleans Convention Center was twice as dangerous: of the 25,000 people there, twenty-four died.

But the real violence appears to have been at the hospitals. There were 312 patients at Memorial Medical Center when the hurricane hit. A week later, thirty-four of them were dead.

Now, the populations at both the Superdome and the Convention Center were made up predominantly of the poor, old and the very young – the populations most likely to die no matter what the circumstances. And, despite reports, it turns out that most of these deaths were not due to violence, but to natural causes.

What happened at the Superdome and the Convention Center did not even rise to the level of a complex emergency, according to Harvard studies. But what happened at Memorial Hospital was worse than decimation. When a population is decimated, only one in ten is killed. Memorial managed a better percentage than that.

This is especially true since most of the deaths appeared to have happened on a single night. Weeks ago, there were anonymous reports in European newspapers in which an American doctor claimed to have murdered several patients in a flooded New Orleans hospital. Given European attitudes and journalistic practice, and lacking further detail, this seemed a report best ignored until more could be discovered.

Well, it appears more has been discovered.

While the MSM were hovering like vultures around three corpses at the Superdome, real murders were happening elsewhere.

It has been noted before that America needs to kill the baby boomers. There are too many of them to be supported by today’s population. This is especially true given that today’s population has seen between one-half and one-third of its members killed in the womb either by surgery or through hormonal “contraception.”

The irony is enormous. The boomers spent their lives killing their own children, now the children will spend their lives killing the boomers. After all, murder – whether it is called euthanasia or involuntary suicide - is much cheaper than actually paying for all the health care the aging population will need. Besides, the organs will come in handy.

As we wait for further reports from New Orleans, we live in a strange mix of 1984 and Brave New World. The language is even now being “adjusted” a la Orwell, but Huxley's big screen televisions distract from the reality. As Memorial Hospital and other hospitals like it slowly become morgues for the living, the attention of the crowd is diverted by the antics at CNN, MTV, and the rest.

Sleight-of-hand becomes the order of the day. Syringe, syringe, who’s got the syringe? If you find it, you win the kewpie doll! Please step to the right as you die to make room. The next corpse approaches, stage left.

Ah, and there’s the question. We call a child after conception a “pre-embryo.” Will we call the hospitalized person a “pre-corpse”? We changed the definition of pregnancy from fertilization to implantation. Will we change the definition of death to “socially useless”? If not, why not? If persons are defined according to whether or not they are wanted, and no one wants the old and injured, then is it murder to kill a pre-corpse?

These are the questions we are beginning to ask as we sunbathe in the Kill Zone.