$51,000 sum is hardly milking it

Control of my death Unequal privilege

The editorial about the Taxpayers’ Union that mentions Christchurch City Council’s expenditure on milk was worrying (Oct 5). When I checked my own milky expenditure, it scared the hell out of me.

You see, we spent $6 today on milk. That’ll last two weeks for two of us. That’s $1.50 a week each. You can see where this is going, can’t you?

Yep, if there were 3260 of us, and we were around for 50 weeks (we drink our own milk when we’re on holiday – and you can do the sums yourself) , we would get through $244,500 worth of milk.

Christchurch City Council must be a pretty stingy bunch if it spends only $51,000 or so, that’s all I can say.

Roger Bould, Waikanae Thank you for a fair article on the recent End of Life Choice Bill debate, which I attended (Oct 5).

I can allow the ‘‘opposed’’ hospice doctor Sinead Donnelly her views if she will be tolerant of mine, but was appalled at the emotional blackmail she used to impose her views on those who don’t share her beliefs.

The dire consequences the opposed side put forward are happening already, with some committing suicide unnecessarily early because people like her want control over other people’s lives.

Donnelly argued that her hospice care would ensure a pleasant death, but my own father died a horrible death from oesophageal cancer – in a Wellington hospice. He desperately wanted to be able to end his life peacefully, before the misery he knew was coming in his last days.

I’m sad this bill doesn’t include the ability to write a last directive.

On the small chance that I am diagnosed with dementia, I would be forced to commit suicide on diagnosis, much earlier than if I could obtain assisted death once specific and rigorous dementia criteria were met.

I would not want my descendants’ last memories of me to be of an unhinged old lady who didn’t recognise them.

Lee Pomeroy, Kilbirnie May I reply to Chris Slater’s confused and provocative letter about the ‘‘shallow’’ thinking Left (Letters, Oct 5 ).

Slater is correct in that we of the West have inherited our values and social systems from Judaeo-Christian Greco-Roman times. But we have also inherited stratification and the class system, an arrangement that confers privilege unequally.

I am not sure what he means by the ‘‘diversity’’ which the Left wants to ‘‘enforce’’, but may I suggest the opposite is the case. We of the reasonable Left would far rather have equality – equality of opportunity, not having to compete unequally for the means to live, access to justice, cultural freedom with the right to diversity – and one could add to the list.

Social stratas and the class system, which we also inherited from ages past, tends to deny these social goods. For all his failings Karl Marx did identify this in his thinking, and so did Jesus Christ; in both cases the greater should be mindful of the lesser.

In his last paragraph, Slater is even more provocative with his talk of destruction and ‘‘forcible overthrow’’. There is ample evidence that we would by all means avoid the use of force to improve social conditions.

And finally, one must question the advice to this paper that it should choose her friends more wisely.

Selwyn Borrman, Waikanae

Reactionary stance

Chris Slater’s explanation of ‘‘the Left’s solution of importing diversity and highlighting differences’, which he believes is somehow destroying our national identity, or perhaps avocado prices (bear with me), was a little opaque.

Is the correspondent’s argument that any questioning of conservatives’ intolerance of diversity and the prejudice they use to advance that intolerance is the main problem facing democratic societies like ours, rather than the intolerance itself?

The solution he appears to suggest is for the Left in particular to ignore and therefore condone intolerance, by remaining silent in the face of growing injustice.

Thankfully, he will not find many takers for this reactionary stance in an increasingly multicultural and diverse society in which more and more New Zealanders are proud to ‘‘live-and-let-live’’. Ethan Tucker, Karori