Don’t Use Death as a Political Weapon

My father had terminal lung cancer. He fought like a Spartan at Thermopylae, his body riddled with chemo and radiation, his stomach filled with macrobiotic foods lovingly prepared by my mother, his mind steeped in the defiance of death as exhibited by Dylan Thomas who wrote the words that were buried with him, in his coffin:

"And you, my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

My father was also a smoker for many years. He started as a young teenager in the 1940s when it was as common as breathing air, and only stopped five years before his death at 43. You could say that my father brought his illness upon himself, because there is no denying that smoking causes lung cancer, and lung cancer hastens death.

We would never accuse someone of causing their own death from lung cancer. We would never, if we were truly good people (and most of us are), smirk triumphantly about the sad lessons being taught to those who ignore science. No one, at least not to my face, dared to blame my father for voluntarily cutting off half a life. If they had, they would have regretted it.

And that is why I am having a very, very hard time with the reaction to Luke Letlow's death from COVID-19 complications last week. The young congressman-elect from Louisiana, a Republican, was rushed to the hospital on Dec. 19 after his condition worsened. He died of a heart attack following an operation.

Letlow was a strong proponent of reopening the economy, a critic of the stark restrictions imposed on small businesses in his state, and for that reason, many on the left began to weave their narrative of "I told you so, he deserved what he got."

You don't need to believe me. Go to Twitter, and follow Vox's Aaron Rupar, or any number of other people without blue checks after their names who found it appropriate to wag their fingers triumphantly as a man was being carried to Heaven.

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