THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

I HATE NATURE! | 2002-07-20

So arguing you won't be brought back or that the world you are bought back in will be strange -- opponents make both arguments at the same time -- makes no sense at all.

Actually, neither of those arguments has anything to do with the real opposition to the whole idea of human freezing.

Many, if not most, of the directors of the cryonics group I belong to are Doctors of Medicine. Yet the only "experts" the media interviews are university professors who are against freezing. I have never seen one of our MD's asked a single question in the media.

The professor "experts" talk about water damage from freezing. We've solved that problem, but no one will ever know it.

The real reason people oppose freezing is because it's "agin' nachur." Rotting away and being eaten by worms, that's what nature intended. That's the healthy way to go.

Being agin' nachur is not only all right with me, it is the only way I ever want to go. As Eric Hoffer pointed out decades ago, "It is no accident that people who say they love nature mostly come from a manicured little island in the North Sea."

It is easy to love nature if you're in England, because there's no nature in England. There is not a hundred square miles of English countryside today which has not been shaped by men down through the ages.

Hoffer, who spent much of his life working in the West, had the same contempt and dislike of Nature that I do.

I was raised working at a brick plant in the sandhills of South Carolina. Beloved Nature to me is red ants, black ants, and, if you sit on a pine log, you may not stand up with all the skin you sat down with. I watched frogs swallow other frogs that were doing their equivalent of a scream. I have seen other things I simply won't mention here, but I bet a lot of my readers have more examples than I do.

I have had more than enough outhouses for my lifetime.

I did a LOT of VERY hard work, and you know what I learned from it? I learned that modern machinery is wonderful. I learned that human beings shouldn't have to get out in a South Carolina summer and push something that a machine can push ten of.

You can butcher that pig if the idea charms you. It doesn't charm me. I get it in a store, preferably microwavable.

All those anti-hunting people say it is cruel for animals to die that way. Not one of them has ever seen how animals usually die in nature. Usually, they are in such pain and hopelessness that they lie down and die.