SlashNOT

Daan writes: In an unusual protest against archaic laws and bigotry, an extended family in Russia quit paying any of their bills for more than two years as they hunkered down in their Moscow apartment to weather their own passing. Appalled officials finally broke into the apartment to confiscate enough property to satisfy the debts accrued, and then evicted the family, subjected them to medical experiments, and buried them.

Morticia Strunk, spokesperson for advocacy group “To Each What He Needs”, used the occasion to deliver a forceful criticism of cultural insensitivity. “We have a situation here where an economically disadvantaged family has been completely destroyed by outdated laws. Those people simply were not capable of paying those bills. They should have been taken care of, not hounded by bill collectors and then plundered, trumpeted as freaks, and ripped asunder as a family.

I know many of you are thinking to yourself, ‘Why did they keep Grandma around after she started smelling?’ And then dad. And then mom. You are asking the wrong questions, the sort of questions your grandparents might have asked. The world is not so brutish anymore. We need to show more compassion for those of us who might be vitality-challenged. These callous laws requiring us to discard the dead, as if they were rubbish to be buried or burned, emotionally scar not only those deprived of their vitality, but their survivors as well, who find themselves senselessly torn from those they love. Personally I could not bear the thought of my partner telling me she would not sleep in the same bed anymore just because I had lost all vitality. Where would the commitment be in that? Love is forever.”

Russian officials refused to comment beyond, “The law’s the law.”