pop culture
Brittany Maynard-Most courageous!
Standard(CNN) — Brittany Maynard, the 29-year-old who said she had terminal brain cancer, took medication to end her life under Oregon’s “Death with Dignity Act,” advocacy group Compassion & Choices said Sunday.
“Brittany chose to make a well thought out and informed choice to Die With Dignity in the face of such a terrible, painful, and incurable illness,” a post on her website said. “She moved to Oregon to pass away in a little yellow house she picked out in the beautiful city of Portland.”
In a statement, Compassion & Choices, an end-of-life choice advocacy group that has been working closely with Maynard, said she “died as she intended — peacefully in her bedroom, in the arms of her loved ones.”
Brittany Maynard’s journey
Maynard passed away Saturday, said the group, which released an official obituary.
The epitaph contained a final message from Maynard, who expressed a note of deep thanks to all of her supporters, whom she “sought out like water” during her life and illness.
“It is people who pause to appreciate life and give thanks who are happiest. If we change our thoughts, we change our world! Love and peace to you all,” she said.
Maynard graduated from University of California, Berkeley, and earned a Masters in Education from University of California, Irvine, according to the obituary. She was a world traveler who volunteered at a local animal rescue organization before her diagnosis and lived 29 years of “generosity, compassion, education, travel, and humor,” it said.
Maynard is survived by her husband and his family, her mother and stepfather.
“While she had longed for children of her own, she left this world with zero regrets on time spent, places been, or people she loved in her 29 years,” the obituary said.
Maynard ticks off last item on bucket list
Maynard’s story spread rapidly on social media as a video explaining her choice garnered more than 9 million views on YouTube.
She became a prominent spokeswoman for the “death with dignity” movement, which advocates that terminally ill patients be allowed to receive medication that will let them die on their own terms. She also became a lightning rod for criticism from people who oppose that approach.
“I quickly decided that death with dignity was the best option for me and my family,” Maynard wrote in an opinion column for CNN explaining her choice. “We had to uproot from California to Oregon, because Oregon is one of only five states where death with dignity is authorized.”
Maynard: I hope my family is proud of me Explaining ‘Death with Dignity’ law Brittany Maynard: I don’t want to die
In a video released last week, Maynard said she hadn’t yet decided when she would end her life.
“I still feel good enough, and I still have enough joy, and I still laugh and smile with my family and friends enough that it doesn’t seem like the right time right now. But it will come, because I feel myself getting sicker. It’s happening each week,” Maynard said in the video, which was produced by Compassion & Choices and released to CNN last Wednesday.
My mother deserved to ‘die with dignity’
Maynard said she had stage IV glioblastoma multiforme, an aggressive form of terminal brain cancer.
When she first started speaking out about her decision, Maynard said that in early November she planned to take the medication she’d been prescribed. In her latest video, she said she was waiting to see how her symptoms progress before deciding on a date.
But taking too long to make that choice was one of her greatest fears, Maynard said.
“The worst thing that could happen to me is that I wait too long because I’m trying to seize each day,” she says, “but I somehow have my autonomy taken away from me by my disease, because of the nature of my cancer.”
-From a grateful blogmeister. Thank you Brittany, for being a shining beacon of courage and spirit, going against the religious brutality of man and forcing the closed-minded to keep their myth off of your decisions. Surely they will stand at their foul pulpits of backward expression and spin tales of you burning in an imaginary place created to subjugate illiterate goat herders of ancient yesteryear. Your actions speak to my heart that there are still several forward-thinking people left in this world of rabid ignorant pop culture who lived their lives to the fullest instead of in front of a T.V living vicariously through the actions of some stupid actor. The intelligent people of this world followed your journey in love and support and never for once judged you for the heartbreaking decision that you had to make at such a young age.
In an age where idiots such as Ben Affleck criticize people like Bill Maher for telling the hard truth, there NEEDS to be more Brittany Maynards in this world. Unfortunately, the Honey Boo Boo trailer trash seems to outlive AND outbreed the intelligent people by about 20-1! A perfect example? 19 Kids and Counting, that horrible show starring the religious hillbillies that believe that an imaginary being wants them to overpopulate the planet and destroy it because they are too ignorant to believe that they are only talking monkeys!
I salute you Ms. Maynard for living more in 29 years than some have in 80! You are my example and someone that I shall tell my children to emulate!
Hipster Hatred
StandardTo be quite clear, I do not dislike hipsters for there ill thought out fashion nonsense, in fact I very much enjoy seeing fools parade about in their sisters’ jeans and a beard long enough to hide a thousand pencils in it. From the high water skinny jeans to the purple plaid shirts, to the iconic Target classic tee underneath, to the faux-hawk hairstyle. These guys have managed to create a fad out of being what they call unique. Sampling from all cultures past and present, they wax ironic, openly challenge people on their adherence to PC convoluted bullshit, and hoist the PBR in victory at being the most diverse of complete fadsters to infect the major cities of the civilized world.
In order to fit into the hipster mold one needs to forsake all common sense and literally become a sampler of culture that has already been established and made unique in it;s own right. The theft of this I compare to the rappers of the 90’s who blatantly stole the lyrics of classic rock to add value to their worthless corporate crap poetry.Of course I cannot complain about the resurgence of the use of vinyl records, Polaroid cameras and many of the other things that were unique to the pre-computer age. With the advent of compact computers we have seen the imminent death of the book, the magazine and the newspaper all within the last 10 years. Hipsters have delayed the demise of these character-filled traditional venues and for this I am grateful, but with this comes the elitist self-righteous attitudes and the ad nauseum adherence to PC follower bullshit that admonishes people to doff their sensibilities and logic.
It has become popular thru social pressure to vilify human nature regarding sex and relationships and to over-complicate any and all means of obtaining casual sex in the modern world. Now there has to be agreements and complex PC social adherence to hipster norms in order to just admit that all you want for the night is to get laid. Male shaming is at an all time high related to the popularized and sensationalized exploits of a few asshole men who cannot distinguish between the words ‘NO’ and ‘YES.’ I, for one, have daughters and would fucking kill any motherfucker who would be stupid enough to attack either of them. I have even adjusted my porn to only include those movies that I know only contain consensual partners. I campaign against human trafficking and would be mortified to find that I was watching porn involving coerced subjects, so yes, I screen my porn. The whole Duke University student thing involving Miriam Weeks/Belle Knox showed that many of these performers are very willing and well paid participants in the adult entertainment industry. Her pithy explanation regarding why she did it holds no water when stacked up against the hundreds of thousands of students who have worked two jobs to afford college. I myself had to do that and I am educated for that decision. Weeks is not a victim, she did this of her own volition, per her own explanation.
I have been told that I am closed minded for saying that I find hipster men to be too effeminate in regards to their thin, emaciated appearance and inability to physically fight off someone who would attack their girlfriend in a dark alley. Women in the hipster vein tend to choose men who weigh less than they do and who would blow away in a strong wind. My secret crush married a man who was shorter than her, slight in frame and absolutely hideous in appearance, but had a gigantic ego to compensate for all of his pussiness. He is the consummate hipster self-important asshole who believes that he is such a unique snowflake in a sea of people who look exactly like he does. I am married, but this woman was responsible for me coming out as an atheist activist and I continue to believe that she should have chosen a better mate. Not me, but maybe in an alternate universe……
Hipsters are a disease, and as we know once a disease takes root it will infect many before it is exterminated, and hipsterism needs to be exterminated. Common sense only exists in the absence of this contagion and I can tell you that the hipster menace is number one in the opinion that the New Atheist Movement is obsolete and that religion and atheism can live side by side. This is a logical fallacy, as they say in debate circles, and needs to be seen as the invasive cancer that it is. Religion is nothing without the doctrine, and Christianity without the Genesis account is totally unnecessary if people only believe the story to be a parable. If this is true then the religion totally unravels and has NO credibility, so why even bother to worship the myth of Yaweh? Most hipsters that I have met are fuzzy belief people who have not a conviction in their body regarding what is right or wrong. They believe that if people live a lie they should be afforded the same credibility as those rooted in reality. This is the ambiguous science denial bullcrap that allows myth to live on as reality for generations after it has been proven fallacy. Religion is un provable crap and needs to give way to that which can be proven.
Again, hipsters are very deluded idiots who complicate reality and promote knee-jerk PC shit that vilifies one sex over the other. Hipsterism is a fad that will die as all other fads have done and will be remembered as a total ridiculous scourge if logic prevails. I continue to go to the gym and am 230lbs at 6ft 1in. Fuck you effeminate hipster fragile assholes, I’m gonna punch the fuck out of the guy who fucks with me in a dark alley!