Edit: Thanks to all the folks taking the time to read through this and correct my thinking. I’m seeing how I wound myself up into a kinda toxic headspace and appreciate the hand out of it.
Context: I spent way too much time on Reddit this week getting into dustups with people blaming Dearborn, Michigan for everything that’s wrong in the world. Turns out I’m too much of a pugilist to agitate correctly and I’m stuck unable to metabolize my disappointment that the libs are refusing to learn anything. I’ll get through it. Anyway, one of the discussions centered around users giving up their organ donor status because they don’t want their organs going to Trump voters.
My initial reaction was that it was spiteful and petty as fuck to rescind your organ donor status over an election not going your way*, and if I’d had more patience and less moral outrage I probably could’ve come up with some sort of clever observation that folks who were okay with waiting until after an election for meaningful action to be taken on a genocide were clearly okay with instrumentalizing the lives of others to achieve an outcome, so maybe they were throwing stones from inside a glass house. But, as I chewed on that argument a little more, I started to wonder. I didn’t really reflect a whole lot on checking the organ donor box; as a materialist I’m assuming I’m not going to need my organs if I meet an untimely demise and it makes sense to let someone else have them if they can do some good; ethics committees exist to make sure they’ll be put to good use. But , at the same time, an ethics committee signed off on a heart for Dick Cheney, a man so famously heartless he couldn’t even be bothered to properly thank the family of the kid whose heart he received. If I could add a clause to my organ donor registry excluding Dick Cheney from my organ donation, I would, even if the odds of him continuing to power his unholy grasp on life with my kidneys are astronomically low. If there’s anyone in this world who’s less entitled to even the organs he grew himself, it’s him.
And over the last year I’ve developed a pretty deep pessimism about Americans in general. I stupidly thought we’d learned as a country from the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan and those of us who hadn’t become irremediable chuds could be more thoughtful in the wake of October 7th, but nope, even the progressives bayed for more blood. If there’s one thing I’ve seen in the wake of the election, it’s that the people who care are an unwelcome minority.
I know it’s not everyone and that I’ve probably done myself no favors with the amount of time I’ve spent online since COVID started, but I feel like I’m trapped in a death cult and it seems perverse to allow my body to continue it even after I’ve died. I’m considering withdrawing my organ donor registration and willing my body to science instead.
tl;dr: you can’t have my lungs unless you can recite The Internationale
*Side note: one thing I’ve discovered is that libs who are loudly proclaiming that they’re done helping anyone who didn’t vote for Kamala Harris is to express the hope that they don’t find themselves in need of help only to find it similarly conditioned. They all assume they’re going to be fine and the one in position to lend support and to imply the possibility of the inverse can lead to some really, really angry reactions.
When I was 19 and moved away from home they put a form to sign up as a donor in the letter with my new health insurance card. I has been a donor ever since. I would like to be a blood donor as well but I’m not eligible due to taking medication.
Sure, one of my organs might go to someone who doesn’t deserve it, a nazi, a chud an asshole. But most people are not irredeemably evil and the chances of that happening are small compared to the chances of my organs going to someone who is just normal or even a good person.
Organ donation is also a small way of being the change you want to see in the world. It literally demands nothing of you but to fill out a form and it has a lot of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need” priciples to it. The fact that people are happily giving up organs and blood to people they will never know, just because they know they need it, expecting nothing in return, defies the perverse liberal claims that the essence of “human nature” is a sociopathic ethics of tit-for-tat transactions.
This doesn’t mean that everything about the way organ donation works today is fine and good, especially in exploitative healthcare systems like the American. Capitalism is spreading it’s rot to all parts of society, also those that are fundamentally good. But as communists wouldn’t we want more things to work on the same principles as organ donation?
No, the laws in my country allow for commercial exploitation of donor tissue products as long as they are derivative tissue products.
For example, washing with saline turns a donor tissue product into a derivative which can be commercially exploited.
Most donation is not the “one to one” whole organ donation that is commonly depicted.
I don’t think this is an issue in the US because of the very permissive laws around unclaimed bodies being able to be donated.
This isn’t especially germane to the conversation being had, but I’m going to post it anyway because it’s the only remotely relevant thing I have to say about organ donation. But did everyone see this story about the guy who was about to be harvested for his organs when someone realized he was not only still alive but also conscious and stopped the procedure? I first saw the story when it was published a month ago but it happened in 2021 so I don’t know if it’s been news before and I just missed it.
It’s this really fucked up story about how all these people working for this Organ Donor nonprofit were pressured from the top to get these organs as quickly as possible, and if I’m reading the story right once staff had realized this man was still alive but before that fact was medically confirmed higher-ups in the nonprofit tried to find another surgeon who would kill this man and take his organs. It ends up being okay, I guess. The guy survives and recovers, the staff who came within a hairsbreadth of murdering a man mostly resigned, and investigations are underway to determine how this could ever happen.
It’s just that the way I remember organ donation being presented to me was as this unambiguous public good and that you didn’t have to if you didn’t want to but it’d be really shitty of you if you didn’t. And maybe that’s still mostly true. But the article goes into a bit about how it’s managed, nationally, by the Association of Organ Procurement Organizations which oversees the various organ procurement organizations that exist in each state/region. You’ve got this thing that should be a national Good, an unambiguous Good, and it’s got these dozens of corporations attached to it. They might be nonprofits, but still they’re corporations. Privatized. Some portion of these nonprofits will be made up of an administrative class that exists to be paid a salary. Like a parasitic mass leeching off the already limited communal goodwill of the American people. And lead to situations like the one from the article, where an addict was almost murdered so a company could harvest his organs.
Organ donation is good, and I still think everyone should do it, but it’s a shame that under this economic system, with these incentives, this good thing isn’t nearly as good as it could be.
Organ Donor nonprofit
Association of Organ Procurement Organizations
damn, what sort of cyberpunk dystopia has several independent organ donation groups instead of it just being handled by the healthcare system?
To approach your question: No, I don’t think you have to worry about your organs saving Dick Cheney. Rich people almost definitely have other ways to get organs and have some sort of priority, so you’re way more likely to save some poor person than you are to save some rich person who would have died otherwise. Rich people will always find a way for organs
and willing my body to science instead.
Damn Americans really are #1 at “here’s the dark side of that thing you thought was a good idea”
Hell yeah. I hope somebody gets some mileage out of these organs
I’m so powerfully good that, if they took my organs, they’d become good as a result of putting a piece of myself into their body. 👍
I dunno, honestly I’m scared I could be killed by some transphobic doctor who assumes I’m better off as organ material than alive. And that could actually be legalized here soon.
I actually genuinely want to be an organ donor which makes this pretty fucked up
Communism is fundamentally about human dignity. We are so used to negating capitalism that we can forget that communism is also a definite, positive conception of the future.
Needing an organ transplant is a vulnerable, scary, and undignified position to find yourself. I don’t care who needs my liver when I’m gone. They are 99.999% not responsible for capitalism even if they are a random Trump supporter, and their suffering will not bring about communism. As a human being I am happy to reduce unnecessary suffering.
Comrades should embody the humanity that they want to see in the world, and let go of petty angers that do not substantially advance the cause.
Wise words
A great reminder. Thank you.
Yeah, but I do think in the back of my mind that some doctor might give up attempting to keep me alive sooner because of it, even if only unconsciously.
Rich/evil fuckheads get priority treatment anyway because we live in hell, so donating my own just increases the pool of donations and therefore the odds that there will be something available for normal folks.
Like if Cheney got my heart, then that means someone else’s heart is not going to him, and can instead go to someone who isn’t a monster. And maybe the latent spite in my heart can kill Cheney.
i just figure if my body can do anything after i die that benefits life’s continuance on the planet, go for it. so yeah, i’m a donor. take whatever is left and do the green funeral / tree planting thing with it. or if that’s too expensive for the people making decisions about my remains, do the burial at sea. that one seems to be the cheapest and pretty energy efficient, and gets all the useless chunks of decaying out into the original ecosystem where the megafauna can get at it but won’t traumatize anybody because they don’t have to see it.
that said, i think any meditation or deliberation on posthumous legacy is a trap. to try to do right to the best of your understanding in the moment without attachment to the outcome is a path to liberation and all that. nobody is a 5D chessmaster, calculating all the angles and probabilities that will unfold over time in the complex system of material reality. at some point you have to surrender to the mystery of never knowing if the choices you made will turn out for the good.
but once i make a billion dollars i will have a gold leafed statue of me built so tall it can tear the stars from the sky, so that all who remain will blindly weep at the god-like, radiant beauty of my face forever.
Yep. Working in emergency I’ve seen three important things:
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What can technically qualify as “surviving” the sort of injury that would make me a candidate for organ donation. I don’t want to be a prisoner in my body and our MAID laws require that you can physically lift a cup of poison and drink it. Every part of that process seems unimaginably painful if I’m even capable of processing pain.
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How bleak nursing homes are. If I survive that injury, the only place I can afford is one where a CNA makes near-minimum wage to handle 20+ patients with complex needs.
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How hopeless being on the transplant list is. Organ failure seems absolutely torturous. With lung failure they come into emergency drowning on room air. With heart failure their legs swell until it’s like they have gout. Dialysis and liver failure are horror shows. Those people are forced to play a pain lottery to survive. If I go to my grave with my organs like a pharaoh I’m just killing X number of people arbitrarily as the last thing I ever do.
Working in emergency
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Sure my organs could go to a bad person. But they could also go to a good person. I’m not going to run the risk of the latter dying just because the former might benefit.
yes, obviously. if you aren’t youre a bad person
Death to America
I normally agree, but I know some minority groups are afraid they’re less likely to be resuscitated so a rich white guy can gank their lungs.
But yeah, signed up for organs and to be on the marrow list.
