You Say No

gwen
You already know I am deeply in love with Doctor Who. Well, Doctor Who is in its off season right now and won’t be back until November. *tear* To tide myself over, I’ve been watching Torchwood, an earth-bound spinoff about combating alien threats on Earth. Series 4 is called Miracle Day, in which the human race simply stops dying. No matter how ravaged a body is, death refuses to come. With a swelling population and hospitals exploding past capacity, the governments of Earth adopt a new health care system in the form of overflow camps, where those who should have died and are now a burden to society are held. The Torchwood team is working frantically to discover the cause behind Miracle Day and to shut down the camps. While undercover in a camp, agent Gwen Cooper uncovers the horrible truth of its existence, and is trying desperately to save her father from the fate that awaits him.

Gwen: Sorry, listen. You have to change this. They move the Category 1’s at six a.m. They take them to the module.
Doctor: Sorry. Not my department.
Gwen: Really? Is that so? Well, do you even know what your department is, Dr. Patel? Do you know what happens in the module?
Doctor: Like I said, I’m rather busy.
Gwen: They burn people. They burn living people. The Category 1’s, they’re still alive, but they’re being burnt. This place is built on institutional murder.
Doctor: I’m not the one who makes the rules.
Gwen: You knew about this?!
Doctor: Category 1’s are dead. That’s the law. Under the emergency rulings, for the sake of public health, dead bodies can be incinerated en masse.
Gwen: Well, I’m glad you’ve got the law on your side. But are you actually there in the module? Are you actually there throwing the switch? Well, are you? No. No, you’re here, nice and safe, hidden behind your paperwork. You haven’t got the nerve to actually watch them burn. Because then you’d have to face the truth–that this isn’t a hospital, it’s a concentration camp.
Doctor: Excuse me.
Gwen: They built a concentration camp here, in Britain, today, and you, you, you! You are one of the staff!
Doctor: The entire health care system is about to collapse. What am I supposed to do?
Gwen: You say no. You say no. That’s what you do. For the love of God you say no.
Soon after, Gwen records a message to the world and takes dramatic action against the incineration modules.

“This is the truth, for the whole world to see. We let our governments build concentration camps. They built ovens for people in our names. Now I don’t care if the whole of society bends over and takes this like a dog. I’m saying no.”

Torchwood frequently makes me think and grabs my heart, but this episode was different somehow. I wasn’t just weeping for fictional characters this time. The system, the rationalisations, the categories of life were so eerily reminiscent of issues in our world today. One issue, mostly. Ask yourself this: Where in our world have we legally redefined what life is? Where have we murdered those unable to defend themselves? Our society has so much blood on our hands, and as one character observes in Miracle Day, you can scrub your hands raw, but you can’t get rid of the blood.

Gwen compared the “overflow” camps to Hitler’s concentration camps. So many people looked the other way during the 1930s and 1940s while Hitler gassed, starved, shot, and buried alive millions of Jews. Some closed their ears to the stories, others hid behind public policies, others kept their disagreement secret in order to save their own lives. And so Hitler was untouchable year after year. What would have happened if the world had stood up and said NO, just a bit earlier? How many lives could have been saved?

Of course, hindsight is 20/20. We can be so self-righteous from the safety of our history classes. But there is another Holocaust happening right underneath our noses. It isn’t making the daily headlines, but the numbers keep ticking by.

Since Roe vs. Wade in 1973, an estimated 53,310,843 unborn babies have died in the American Holocaust of abortion — and that’s just up through 2010.

Watch this documentary. It paints a powerful picture comparing the Nazi Holocaust to the abortion crisis in America today.

Someone needs to stand up and say no, before history looks back on us as the generation that did nothing.

“You say no. You say no. That’s what you do. For the love of God you say no… Now I don’t care if the whole of society bends over and takes this like a dog.

I’m saying no.”