If I had one more day to live. What would I do? Or better, what should I do?
Should I visit family and friends? If only I were a person person, I guess I should say goodbye. But I am not, i.e. people are not all important for me Actually, no person or place ought to be in dire need of seeing another, when having had ample opportunities to do so in the years before So, no, if I had one more day to live, I shouldn’t spend the time on family and friends.
What about visiting new places I haven’t seen before? I’m sorry, but the same argument applies here. If you haven’t seen it by the time you die, it’s probably not worth it, unless, of course, you have forgotten to live while you could. In any case, I wouldn’t be able to enjoy visiting a new place with so little time left.
Perhaps I would like to say something about what I should or should not have done in my life, or I might want to say something about how I would like the world to be. The latter is certainly the case. I would like to see the world become a better place, inhabited by people who care more for what they do to other sentient beings, esp. what they do to non-human animals.
I have spent my life in an environment where the status quo has been over-protected. I have accepted social pressures severely limiting my freedom of speech in a way I have always considered to be morally unacceptable. Yet, for the sake of job, social and financial security, I have let ‘them’ make me silent. I’ve tried to improve the world for animals from within. With little or no success. I have failed in many respects. So, if I only had one more day to live, I would like to say: “Please, be aware of the fact that animals matter morally; that they deserve our respect, and that practices involving deliberately-inflicted animal suffering such as castration, debeaking and tail docking should stop immediately, despite the apparently counter-intuitive suggestion that these procedures are sometimes conducted for the so-called benefit of the animals too. They are not.”