"It's silly to keep people alive who have a terrible disease"
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Cold as it sounds, Cunningham’s line carries the bracing pragmatism of someone who spent a lifetime staring at bodies with unsentimental clarity. As a photographer, she wasn’t paid to console; she was paid to look. That matters here: the sentence isn’t a philosophical puzzle so much as a refusal of polite euphemism. “Silly” is the knife. It’s not “tragic” or “complicated” or “morally fraught.” It’s wasteful, even faintly absurd, to treat mere biological continuation as an automatic good when suffering has swallowed the person.
The subtext is less about death than about control. Cunningham came of age when medicine was rapidly expanding its power to prolong life, often without the matching cultural language for what that prolongation meant. In the early-to-mid 20th century, “keeping people alive” increasingly became something institutions did: hospitals, doctors, families acting out duty, fear, or social expectation. Her phrasing pushes back against that machinery. It implies a suspicion that the living can become captives of other people’s need to avoid guilt.
Context complicates it. Cunningham’s era also overlapped with the eugenic thinking that stained American public policy, especially in California. Her remark can read as a blunt argument for euthanasia and dignity; it can also echo a period when “terrible disease” was used to sort lives into worth-saving and disposable. That tension is why the line lands: it’s shockingly efficient, and it forces the listener to decide whether they hear compassion for suffering, impatience with dependency, or both.
The subtext is less about death than about control. Cunningham came of age when medicine was rapidly expanding its power to prolong life, often without the matching cultural language for what that prolongation meant. In the early-to-mid 20th century, “keeping people alive” increasingly became something institutions did: hospitals, doctors, families acting out duty, fear, or social expectation. Her phrasing pushes back against that machinery. It implies a suspicion that the living can become captives of other people’s need to avoid guilt.
Context complicates it. Cunningham’s era also overlapped with the eugenic thinking that stained American public policy, especially in California. Her remark can read as a blunt argument for euthanasia and dignity; it can also echo a period when “terrible disease” was used to sort lives into worth-saving and disposable. That tension is why the line lands: it’s shockingly efficient, and it forces the listener to decide whether they hear compassion for suffering, impatience with dependency, or both.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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