Thursday, January 11, 2018
Should others be able to tell me that I "should" donate organs even while alive? "Should" give to or promote a specific charity?
Dylan Matthews of Vox media offers a rather strident
piece, “Why I gave my kidney to a stranger, and why you should consider doing it too”, dated back in April.
The piece is rather long, almost a short book. But I
get concerned when others tell me what “you” should do, out of collective values.
When I was growing up, heroic medical interventions
were rarely expected because they weren’t yet possible. Apart from blood drives, you rarely heard
about organ donation. But the culture has changed in recent years, as Robin
Roberts demonstrated on ABC about her own receiving a bone marrow transplant to
stave off an unusual leukemia.
Gay men got bounced out of the blood and therefore
organ donation loop by HIV in the 1980s, and only very recently have been
allowed back in with very strict conditions of previous long term abstinence..
But a bigger point is a sense of body sanctity (even
if I don’t wear shorts anymore). Simple
blood donation is one thing; plasmapheresis is another; but undergoing major
surgery sounds over the top. I can imagine other places this goes ("Be brave and shave").
Yet, I don’t have the ability to bond intimately
with people to get beyond these sensitivities.
I saw a tweet from a friend (in the media) noting a
charity he had donate do (regarding displaced Syrians) with the comment “you
should to.” Again, it’s not appropriate
for others to decide what my priorities should be. But in this case, I looked up the small
charity, and set up an arrangement for a small automated monthly contribution from
my mother’s trust. So the “should”
worked.
There is some karma here. In the past, even before AIDS was a well
known problem, there were incidents in my own personal life involving the
possibility of dialysis and also of a lymphoma-like cancer among personal
friends. And of course HIV took over everything in the 80s.
There was an incident at work around 1993 when I was embarrassed
at work about not being able to join a blood drive. Yet during the aftermath of the Russian anti-gay
propaganda law of 2013, I actually heard the comment that gay people were
viewed as undermining the solidarity of the public over blood and organ
donations.
I generally do not allow “other people’s causes” to
take over my own presence or self-branding. I don’t use
my social media pages for “other people’s fundraising” or political activism,
but I will give links to these. I don’t allow my home or car to display ads for
other causes (other than the Libertarian sticker on my rear bumper).
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