By Mark David Blum, Esq.

When we gave doctors total control over our health with the enactment of the Harrison Act, little did we know that along with that delegation, we would also surrender the power to decide whom among us lives and who dies.

Ten months ago, New Orleans was flooded off the map. A City almost died. Many people did. One third of Police and hundreds of government workers abandoned their posts and the citizens of the City. This is all almost expected in the chaos that follows a natural disaster. To abandon your post is an act of shame. Murdering your charges so you can save your own hide is disgusting and deplorable.

I first caught wind of this story back in September of 2005; shortly after Katrina hit. Not a word was heard about it for almost a year thereafter and I began to believe it was just another internet hoax. Then, about two weeks ago, I learned that there was an investigation and doctors were indicted. Today, I read how their colleagues not only defend murdering patients, but consider the doctors to be heroes for doing so. That makes me sick.

In case you forgot: Horror, chaos, violence, and death stalked the streets of New Orleans. This situation did not rise from the Hurricane or the resulting storm surge. By the morning after, most of the City survived.

It was the broken levee and subsequent flood that drowned and erased much of New Orleans from view. Gross negligence by the experts, cheapskate and lazy politicians, penny-pinching government officials, and general malaise by the taxpayer all contributed to the breaking of the levee. From that, so much pain, misery, and suffering followed the flooding waters.

I thought lived in a nation where Americans treat Americans as brothers. At least that theory is what we sell in every Middlesex, village, and farm.

Of late, there has been of late a great “awakening” where the conservatives and Republicans have laid claim to the heart and soul (and wallet) of this nation. Life is so precious, property rights so inalienable, and morality so supreme, that everything else but war is cast aside.

We as a nation have faced some serious introspection and soul-searching as soldiers and rescue crews search out the dead in New Orleans. Exposed with receding flood waters has been the toxic ugly stink that has infected our collective conscience and soul. All wonderful theories, high fallutin` moralities, and dreams of perfection are about to come crashing down hard on us.

Where we stand as a people; who we are as a nation, and how we treat our fellow man is about to face its ugliest test yet. Remember Terry Schaivo? Frankly, her situation t’weren’t nothing compared to what is about to erupt. Perhaps someone should ask John Roberts about this.

According to the London Daily Mail, “Doctors working in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans killed critically ill patients rather than leaving them to die in agony as they evacuated hospitals.” The article goes on further to describe how, “with gangs of rapists and looters rampaging through wards in the flooded city, senior doctors took the harrowing decision to give massive overdoses of morphine to those they believed could not make it out alive.”

“One New Orleans doctor told how she 'prayed for God to have mercy on her soul' after she ignored every tenet of medical ethics and ended the lives of patients she had earlier fought to save … Her heart-rending account has been corroborated by a hospital orderly and by local government officials. One emergency official, William 'Forest' McQueen, said: "Those who had no chance of making it were given a lot of morphine and lain down in a dark place to die."

What the hell has happened to our Nation? This is NOT the United States of America. It is not the nation of my fathers and theirs. Ours is no longer a people United in cause and belief.

Mercy killing? When Terry Schaivo had to languish and suffer for so long. Bing bang boom; a quick shot of morphine, and a dark place to go ni-ni … that is how American doctors respond to suffering and helplessness of their patients. Kill the patient because it is easier than protecting and saving them? Cowards, all.

Reading of this tale makes this a very sad day in my life as an American citizen. I am ashamed of my Country. From hereon, I join with the crowd that believes in the new American doctrine of “each man for himself and the hell with the rest of you.”

Heaven have mercy upon your soul should you become a nuisance to a doctor or the taxpayer.