Let's have a reality check here.
Charlie's gonna be just fine, and he knows it. He may die choking on his own vomit after a night of sloppy coitus with supermodels, high out of his gourd on a mixture of coke, ectasy, haldol, and lithium, but I'm not sold 100% on the notion that this is an awful way to go. I mean, if we've figured a way not to go at all, by all means enlighten me, but if the suggestion is that it's better to die with dignity in a hospital room as a cancer-ridden old man whose principal activity during his last few months on this earth was filling up a colostomy bag, you've kind of lost me.
I don't see why any of us should be giving Charlie any grief. From what I've read, he hasn't gone off on any tangents about race and religion. He called AA a cult, which is rather long-standing criticismm many have leveled (court-mandated AA meetings are a shameless conflict of church and state). He thinks of Chuck Lorre as a hack and a moron, and Chuck has yet to produce any output that would contradict this assessment. Dharma and Greg, Big Bang Theory, and his other sitcoms represent that brand of humor that relies less on wit and more on over-the-top quirky character gags and laughtracks that transmit a Pavlovian signal to the audience when it's time for them to laugh (OK, I admit that Cybil was a guilty pleasure).
Don't we all sit around wishing that more public figures would stop reading public statements written for them by spin doctors and instead come out and say what's actually on their minds? Don't many of us enjoy morning radio because the hosts of those shows fill this role of straight-shooter that isn't afraid to ruffle feathers? We're just not used to actors being unpolished because they're generally so concerned with the marketability of their image.