After a surprisingly unexpected and involuntary break from writing this column, I’ve returned. My administratively designated summer vacation is thankfully over. So now, without further ado, let’s get back to business.

If you haven’t yet heard, Jack Kevorkian recently celebrated his own version of a “silver anniversary.” “Doctor Death,” as the oh-so-unbiased press affectionately calls him, has assisted in (or, as he prefers, “attended”) a twenty-fifth suicide.

Whether or not we agree with his character, the fact that he is real cannot be denied. Jack Kevorkian is flesh and blood manifesting some of our deepest virtues or vices, needs or nightmares, desires or defiances. Although the man himself is widely supported by the public (as polls, vague numerical vehicles, indicate), it’s not him that discussions of assisted suicide should center around. Instead, it’s the man’s mission, his motivation, for doing what he does, which should command our focused and rational attention.

Here, I should pause. While I can soundly explain the justification of assisted suicide, I’d prefer a different angle. I’d like to raise a question: Just why is it that society continually treads water on the issue? Rather than discuss it, we leave it alone as if it’ll solve itself. How curious . . .

Consider why Jack Kevorkian does what he does. He recognizes that there is a limit to technological imposition on autonomy; medical paternalism, in his view, has its limits. A proponent of dignity, mercy and compassion, he’s merely done what we, as a whole, have failed to — choose whether life is worth respecting at the expense of irrepressible pain. He’s had the gall, the vision, where we’ve had none. Rather than an aberration, perhaps he can be called a pioneer of sorts. Pioneers aren’t always mad revolutionaries, either; more often than not, they arouse and instill the seeds of change like no one else can.

The high courts of the state in which Kevorkian operates, Michigan, have found it impossible to prosecute him. However, just the same, they keep rejecting the acknowledgement of a constitutional right to participate in an assisted suicide, as either a patient or a convalescent. Their reasoning? Ethical issues are separate from politics we are meekly told.

But, the refusal to make a decision in the name of practical significance is not just a failure of the judicial institution itself, but also of our society in general. The rationale that “certain” social and moral, ethical or largely philosophical issues shouldn’t be decided in the public arena of a trial court is maligned thinking. While, perhaps they shouldn’t be solely decided in such a setting, it doesn’t mean that they should remain separate from it, only decided by yogis in a supposed hyperbaric vacuum of justice. The ideal of such an imaginary division is a perverted one; society isn’t cut so cleanly.

Courts refuse to hear cases on assisted suicide not because they’re unnecessary court fodder, but because they’re afraid to know the answer. This feeling even extends up through the United States Supreme Court. Frightened to receive well-publicized whiplash the magnitude of Roe v. Wade, the court vows not to wade into profound insight until society has made its choices clearer than they are at present. Silence precedes having a spine.

How is society to render its choices clear, if few (if any) of its highest institutions are reluctant to participate in that decision-making process? There is no such thing as political autonomy, separate from the society within which it is encompassed. Fear is the constraint that must be broken and cast aside if the concept social policy is to mean anything significant. At present, in light of society’s self-induced and silent confusion, it means little.

Although issues like assisted suicide are difficult ones to grasp holistically, it’s not as if they don’t deserve serious and resolute contemplation. Merely leaving the issues to be resolved in the darkened corners of a given humanities department is not enough. There must be more— real time and concerted application of pragmatic, timely and reasonable principles must come to the forefront.

Until society’s medical, educational, judicial, legislative, political and other institutions comprehensively talk without exhaustion, and make a practical decision with some substance, all the Kevorkians out there will have to appear like ordinary, average guys. In the meantime, shame for having mercy shouldn’t be placed on him, a decision-maker, but on us, the silent participants of a broken democracy.

David Ptak is a senior in philosophy with minors in history and journalism and mass communication from Long Island, New York.