"Five to six thousand people die every year waiting for organs, but nobody cares"
About this Quote
“Five to six thousand people die every year waiting for organs, but nobody cares” lands like an accusation disguised as a statistic. Kevorkian doesn’t pick a sentimental anecdote; he picks a body count. Numbers are supposed to calm debates, make them “policy.” Here, the number is a weapon: if thousands die in a slow, bureaucratic way and the public barely notices, then what, exactly, is our moral panic really about?
The subtext is classic Kevorkian: a cold spotlight on selective outrage. In the 1990s, he became the face of assisted suicide, cast by critics as a menace and by supporters as a blunt instrument against medical hypocrisy. This line flips the script. If society is willing to tolerate preventable deaths created by organ scarcity, paperwork, and squeamishness around donation, then condemning a person who insists on choice at the end of life starts to look less like ethics and more like comfort maintenance. We police the dramatic death, not the quiet, sanctioned ones.
“Waiting” does heavy lifting. It evokes passivity, a system where suffering is prolonged by design: legal caution, cultural taboo, institutional inertia. “Nobody cares” is hyperbole, but strategic hyperbole: it indicts not individuals’ feelings but institutions’ priorities. Kevorkian’s intent isn’t to mourn; it’s to shame, to force a comparison between deaths we treat as tragedies and deaths we treat as background noise. It’s activism by moral contrast, engineered to make complacency feel like complicity.
The subtext is classic Kevorkian: a cold spotlight on selective outrage. In the 1990s, he became the face of assisted suicide, cast by critics as a menace and by supporters as a blunt instrument against medical hypocrisy. This line flips the script. If society is willing to tolerate preventable deaths created by organ scarcity, paperwork, and squeamishness around donation, then condemning a person who insists on choice at the end of life starts to look less like ethics and more like comfort maintenance. We police the dramatic death, not the quiet, sanctioned ones.
“Waiting” does heavy lifting. It evokes passivity, a system where suffering is prolonged by design: legal caution, cultural taboo, institutional inertia. “Nobody cares” is hyperbole, but strategic hyperbole: it indicts not individuals’ feelings but institutions’ priorities. Kevorkian’s intent isn’t to mourn; it’s to shame, to force a comparison between deaths we treat as tragedies and deaths we treat as background noise. It’s activism by moral contrast, engineered to make complacency feel like complicity.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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