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Terri Schiavo: The Locked-in State
Human Events Online ^ | March 31, 2005 | Sherry and Steven Eros

Posted on 03/31/2005 11:17:09 AM PST by hinterlander

Over 2000 years ago the Athenians condemned and executed the philosopher Socrates and the Romans tortured and murdered Jesus Christ. We tend to dismiss the mindless cruelty and barbarity of these acts, this snuffing-out of the lives of two of the greatest benefactors of mankind, as quite understandable, even if lamentable, given the assumption that ancient societies were unfamiliar with the refinements of modern liberal democracy, limited representative government, checks and balances, minority rights and the like. Such travesties of justice could never occur in our modern, highly evolved age--certainly not in America. Cold-blooded court-sanctioned murder of innocents, not to mention the noblest and best of our fellow citizens, is unthinkable here.

What happened in ancient Athens and Jerusalem could never be replicated under our system of laws, in our enlightened age, with a Bill of Rights, standards of proof, jury trials and all the other available protections of individual rights. Compassionate Americans would never stand for their government yanking perfectly innocent citizens off the streets, from their workplaces or out of their homes without due process of law. The slow pace of justice coupled with all the statutory and constitutional protections insures that mistakes are almost always avoided or corrected once brought to the public’s attention. With the endless stream of motions and appeals, death penalty cases can easily take more than a decade to resolve. Anyway, Americans would rather see the proverbial "ten guilty men go free, than one innocent man wrongly imprisoned or executed." The torture to which the benighted Romans subjected Jesus cannot happen here in America. Those who participate in merely moral or intellectual disagreements or protests need not fear persecution; certainly not capital punishment. Why, the state is powerless to even arrest open traitors in our midst, much less exterminate those we believe are miseducating our young.

We Americans, we’re modern; we’re open-minded; we’re compassionate; we’re tolerant; we’re pluralistic; and we pride ourselves above all in protecting the powerless and downtrodden. Apart from some individual who in the dark crevices of the justice system is unknowingly framed, or erroneously convicted by corrupt officials, things like that just don’t happen in the full light of public scrutiny. The lumbering machinery of the state and its criminal justice system, its courts, would never permit government-ordered murder right out in the open, right in front of our eyes. Not with the full attention of every member of the House of Representatives, every United States Senator, every judge in every federal court in the land--from the lowest federal district court to the highest court in the land, the United States Supreme Court, with the full knowledge of a governor and even the president of the United States. After all, we have a free and open media eager to scrutinize every capital case, every government injustice, every government overreach.

Well, the case of Terri Schiavo gives the lie to all of it. The state-sanctioned judicial torture-killing of Terri Schiavo serves to remind modern man that little has changed over the last 2400 years plus. The State power quite openly decided that Christ and Socrates were troublemakers who needed to be stopped. Both were fated for State execution from the beginning.

The life and death of the philosopher Socrates may not be quite as familiar to every American as Jesus’. Socrates devoted his life to educating his fellow Athenians to the nature of justice in the conviction that knowledge was the path to justice. But he was put to death by the very system of justice he spent his life trying to improve through his searching style of education that has come to be known as the Socratic method, asking the kinds of questions that make the self-satisfied uneasy. Socrates was a man who found the highest value reflected in the soul of every human being he met. He engaged and examined each person intellectually and morally, challenging those with whom he agreed no less than those who disagreed with him. He was a man who dared to stare directly at the glaring light of the truth without averting his eyes. If we stare too long directly at the light of the sun, it blinds us permanently. Socrates contrasted the sunlight that blinds the physical eyes with the healing mindlight of pure intellection--demonstrating that the longer we stare at the light of pure truth, the more our soul’s vision is healed.

Even when threatened with death, Socrates refused to desist from exhorting his fellow citizens to be guided by the pure light of divine knowledge of justice, ever encouraging them to avoid being tricked by the dazzling things of this world whose brightness is merely reflective, transitory and illusory. For living his life in unstinting pursuit of truth and reality, and for encouraging his fellow citizens to do the same, he was sentenced by his Athenian citizen-judges to death on the charge of corrupting the youth of Athens, and executed after a short term in prison. Caring little for life in this world, and welcoming the death that would bring him everlasting life without the burden of the body encasing his soul, Socrates refused to abandon his search for God and Truth. His plea to the judges was not to spare his life for his own benefit--for by then he was over 70 years old and would soon die anyway even if pardoned--but rather that the state should refrain from this grievous injustice for its own sake, and that of his individual accusers. Socrates was convinced that to do evil is infinitely worse than to suffer evil at the hands of another and that, just as illness destroys the body, so great injustice destroys the soul of the unjust individual and country. His plea went unheeded by his enemies and his State, and we know that his countrymen suffered grievously after his death. We may only imagine the judgment that awaited those who falsely accused him, adjudged him guilty, and executed him.

As we all know, Socrates’ religious counterpart, Jesus Christ, as pure a man as ever lived, was betrayed and tortured unmercifully before being crucified, laughingly reviled for his willingness to purchase the lives of others with his own torture and death. Thousands of those who remained true to his ideals and teachings have been similarly reviled, tormented and murdered merely for living in Jesus Christ’s name.

The case of Terri Schiavo is not without parallels to the lives of these men, as startling as that claim may seem. Of course, Terri never taught a course or delivered a sermon, never evinced expansiveness of intellect or professed deep spiritual ideas. Unlike Jesus and Socrates, Terri did not intentionally provoke her fellow men into pursuing certain spiritual paths or intellectual questions. But are those the only paths to serving as a great educator of mankind?

If nothing else, Terri Schiavo certainly shares with Socrates and Jesus the quality of innocence. It is ironic that in her debilitated state, brain damaged and unable to report either what happened to her 15 years ago or her present thoughts and wishes, she has become one of mankind’s leading moral provocateurs. -- What is life? What constitutes a fulfilled life? Who should make judgments on the continuation of life? Under what circumstances should the life of the physically or mentally disabled be prolonged? Does illness or injury necessarily diminish the will to live? -- Terri causes us to think about these essential questions at depths and in ways not encountered in recent times. What makes her so compelling is the fact that she is the embodiment of the most difficult and complex problems we face today. She has challenged our assumptions about our selves, our souls, our lives, our moral principles and even our system of government more fundamentally than any human being in decades, even centuries.

Unlike Christ or Socrates, Terri Schiavo was said to have no mind with which to mount her own defense. In this postmodern age in which we are entranced with the marvels of technological wizardry, and in which we seem to worship the body more and more, it is stunning that the greatest human lessons about human existence are being learned from someone who, while she lived, was diagnosed as being Persistent Vegetative State, said to suffer from a brain that had liquified (in the immortal words of The New York Times and The Washington Post and many leading physicians) with nothing left that mentally resembled human life.

Unlike Christ or Socrates, Terri Schiavo was reported to have no voice. While the former suffered so harshly for eloquently giving voice to their provocative ideas, she suffered precisely for being unable to verbalize anything at all. But this lent her long-anticipated (and in some quarters, hoped-for) death a drama no less compelling than theirs. The state in her case decided to execute (and an execution it was) a woman who suffered an attack that rendered her seemingly defenseless and voiceless for the last 15 years. Yet her vulnerable humanity will continue to scream louder than any voice for the truth and justice and humanity of which she was deprived by the cruelty and pitilessness of an unhearing world.

Unlike Christ or Socrates, Terri Schiavo was not afforded a trial in which she could participate or even be represented by her own lawyer. Oh, yes, there were the appeals and more appeals, but Terri was not there, could not speak, could not testify. Her husband, the only one present when she suffered the attack that deprived her lungs of oxygen, damaged her brain and allegedly left her mindless and voiceless, controlled the legal proceedings. The legal maneuvers and ritualistic denials of appeals had an air of unreality and doom. All of her decisions were being made by an estranged spouse with suspect motives under the mantle of judicial legitimacy. Doctors and lawyers and judges were engaged to decide her fate, but blinded themselves to the facts. The mockery of justice and the indignity attending the deaths of Jesus Christ and Socrates, the hopelessness and defenselessness of these men in the face of calculated and remorseless State murder, has nothing over the case of Terri Schiavo.

For those who know of her suffering and stand in her shadow unable to help, this has been an unbearable sentence of death.

Unlike Christ and Socrates, Terri Schiavo was not marched off to the site of her execution. The movie sensation last year was "The Passion of the Christ," a film created to tell the story of the torture and murder of Jesus Christ. Scenes of flogging and being refused water on the via Dolorosa were vividly brought to life as concrete examples of unbearable, unimaginable suffering. Terri Schiavo was unable to march to her fate, unable to bear any cross. But can one imagine more suffering than the case of a stricken, paralyzed woman, a living breathing human being, who was intentionally deprived of food and water for weeks while America’s courts committed a slow motion killing of an utterly innocent human being right in front of our eyes?

During the ordeal, many supporters of Terri Schiavo wondered, Why isn't someone in power doing something? Why doesn’t the governor issue an executive order, a pardon, a reprieve, send in the National Guard if necessary? None of that was possible, or so we were told.

A last ditch effort was organized by those loyal to Socrates while he sat, a man condemned, awaiting the execution of a death penalty his friends found unthinkable. Rejecting the plan of escape hatched by his loyal old friend Crito, Socrates decided to accept the death sentence handed-down at his trial, consuming the poison hemlock drink; submitting despite the monstrous injustice of an innocent and great man being put to death. At trial, Socrates had given a detailed and highly complex explanation for his moral choice to accept his death sentence, comprising his commitment to the law, his loyalty to Athens, his attachment to his Athenian students, the unseemliness of an old man on-the-run in a foreign country, and above all his longstanding conviction that there is a higher reality and an afterlife for which he yearned desperately. His defense at trial was highly spirited and aggressive, motivated not by a desire to extend his own temporal existence but to prevent an injustice for which his vicious Athenian accusers would suffer eternally.

Unlike Socrates, Terri Schiavo cannot mount any defense in words but she has supporters as well. Why do they passively accept the court order to remove the feeding tube that will culminate in the monstrous and completely avoidable death of an innocent woman? They battled furiously in the courts to preserve her life, ultimately failing. If not verbally, has Terri Schiavo been speaking to us in some other way? Perhaps she is silently teaching the same lesson given by Jesus and Socrates by compelling us to contemplate the fact that laws are only man-made and if life is to have meaning and value there must be something that transcends life, from which all of life’s meaning and value are derived.

To a corrupt nation, Terri Schiavo is a living, breathing, thinking, willing, loving rebuke and provocation. She exposes all that is worst in us, the lawlessness, crassness, hard-heartedness, and viciousness that we see almost everywhere around us. In her silence she elegantly refutes the shameless fraud of the bioethics experts, the callousness of the Death Doctors and the Right-to-Die enthusiasts, the tyranny of an unchecked judiciary, the utter depravity of the secular humanists. In her debilitated state, nearly squeezed dry of life, she filled the world with her voiceless eloquence.

One last observation now that she has died. Due to the pall of unreality enveloping these events, those actively witnessing Terri Schiavo’s struggle cannot but feel a deep unease and conflictedness, sensing that on the one hand the world ought to have come to a dead stop until this immense evil was undone, and feeling on the other hand that her progression toward death was inexorable--that the forces of death were not about to halt for even a second, and we were utterly powerless to intervene. This state of unsettledness reveals to us that we, not Terri Schiavo, are the ones in a "locked-in" state, with minds and wills imprisoned in paralyzed bodies, powerless to find the right words and actions to effectively intervene or cry for help, unable to prevent the monstrous torture-killing that occurred right in front of our eyes.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial; US: Florida
KEYWORDS: death; kill; schiavo; schindler; tube

1 posted on 03/31/2005 11:17:10 AM PST by hinterlander
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To: hinterlander
To a corrupt nation, Terri Schiavo is a living, breathing, thinking, willing, loving rebuke and provocation. She exposes all that is worst in us, the lawlessness, crassness, hard-heartedness, and viciousness that we see almost everywhere around us. In her silence she elegantly refutes the shameless fraud of the bioethics experts, the callousness of the Death Doctors and the Right-to-Die enthusiasts, the tyranny of an unchecked judiciary, the utter depravity of the secular humanists. In her debilitated state, nearly squeezed dry of life, she filled the world with her voiceless eloquence.

My favorite lines of an extremely eloquent analysis. Thanks for the post.

2 posted on 03/31/2005 11:18:45 AM PST by FormerACLUmember (Honoring Saint Jude's assistance every day.)
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Comment #3 Removed by Moderator

To: job.filbers

Go away troll


4 posted on 03/31/2005 11:20:54 AM PST by msp2004
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To: job.filbers

Welcome to Free Republic!


5 posted on 03/31/2005 11:22:00 AM PST by frogjerk
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To: hinterlander
the forces of death were not about to halt for even a second, and we were utterly powerless to intervene.

This is true. I never had much hope that the judiciary was going to relent and save her, because I thought they had their minds made up long before - they rightly saw it as a matter of sticking up for one of their own (and hence defending their own power), no matter how misguided and laden with conflict of interest his decision may have been.

Yet I think that many people, including some of our elected officials, never thought it would get this far. Being used to wending their way through bureaucracy, they really expected common sense and decency to prevail in the long run. The fact that it did not is probably an eye-opener to people who trusted the system.

6 posted on 03/31/2005 11:29:14 AM PST by livius
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To: hinterlander

Terri, you will not be forgotten.


7 posted on 03/31/2005 11:32:47 AM PST by grassboots.org (I'll Say It Again - The first freedom is life.)
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To: hinterlander

Whether 2000 years ago, or today, man is still fallen and in need of redemption.


8 posted on 03/31/2005 11:33:28 AM PST by Kenny Bunkport
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To: All

This whole thing is such a damn pathetic.


9 posted on 03/31/2005 11:40:20 AM PST by Esteemed Scholar Jack Bauer
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To: hinterlander
Have nothing to do with a false charge and do not put an innocent or honest person to death, for I will not acquit the guilty. (Exodus 23:7)

There are six things the LORD hates, seven that are detestable to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked schemes, feet that are quick to rush into evil, a false witness who pours out lies and a man who stirs up dissension among brothers (Proverbs 6:16-19)

Acquitting the guilty and condemning the innocent- the LORD detests them both. (Proverbs 17:15)

You have condemned and murdered innocent men, who were not opposing you. (James 5:6)

10 posted on 03/31/2005 11:41:50 AM PST by 14erClimb
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To: hinterlander
"The deceased's next of kin must prosecute the killer on a charge of murder."

--Plato, Laws 866b.

Useless when the killer is the judge. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

11 posted on 03/31/2005 11:54:48 AM PST by Verginius Rufus
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To: 14erClimb; hinterlander

Thank you for this post, hinterlander.

Thank you for the applicable Scripture, 14erClimb.

I disagree, as does the Bible, with the idea that the death of the Christ is laid at the feet of the Roman government.
It may be a very pc view but Scripture doesn't brook falsehoods.

What is evident is that in each case God has had the last say about those who murdered the innocent. God help us now.


12 posted on 03/31/2005 11:58:16 AM PST by Spirited (God, Bless America)
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To: Spirited
I disagree, as does the Bible, with the idea that the death of the Christ is laid at the feet of the Roman government. It may be a very pc view but Scripture doesn't brook falsehoods.

Jesus' death lies at the feet of the Roman government and the Jewish government/theocracy in Judea. These two groups are a type and they represent the world. I.e., the blood and death of Jesus is on the hands of the both Jew and Gentile. We are all guilty for putting Him on the cross. Praise God, His blood washes away the sins of the world!

13 posted on 03/31/2005 12:20:20 PM PST by JesusIsLord
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To: hinterlander

Excellent analogy of Jesus and Socrates - the man who knew nothing.

"The difficulty, my friends is not in avoiding death, but in avoiding unrighteousness; for that runs faster than death. I am old and move slowly, and the slower runner has overtaken me, and my accusers are keen and quick, and the faster runner, who is unrighteousness, has overtaken them. And now I depart hence condemned by you to suffer the penalty of villany and wrong; and I must abide by my award - let them abide theirs."





14 posted on 03/31/2005 1:08:21 PM PST by mjtobias (Our love for Terri was immense; her parents' love was infinite; God's love is everlasting.)
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To: grassboots.org
"Terri, you will not be forgotten."

Terri is all of us. I will forever carry her smile in my heart for as long as I live. And I will never forget our coward and feckless politicians come election time. Terri's blood is in their hands. Shame on them!


Terri Schiavo Before dehydration

God Bless you Terri in your hour of death

Let everyone who said your beautiful smile was fake be haunted by it for the rest of their days.

15 posted on 03/31/2005 1:13:16 PM PST by mjtobias (Our love for Terri was immense; her parents' love was infinite; God's love is everlasting.)
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To: JesusIsLord
The authors of the piece wrote, ".....and the Romans tortured and murdered Jesus Christ."
The Bible is devoid of that kind of pc altered/revised history even if the Jews forced Gibson to improve upon the Word:

Peter on the subject, when in Acts 3 addressing "Ye men of Israel"
continued "the God of our fathers, hath glorified his Son Jesus; whom ye delivered up, and denied him in the presence of Pilate, when he was determined to let [him] go.
Act 3:14-15 But ye denied the Holy One and the Just, and desired a murderer to be granted unto you; And killed the Prince of life, whom God hath raised from the dead; whereof we are witnesses."

Pilate, representing the Roman government, "was determined to let him go"; according to Peter. But "ye denied the Holy One and the Just"..."and killed the Prince of life.."

Perhaps we are now supposed to believe Jesus was wrong when as the Holy Spirit caused Matthew to recall in Chapter 23:31-36 Jesus said they were snakes "who would not escape the damnation of hell"
and
Mat 23:34-35 "Wherefore, behold, I send unto you prophets, and wise men, and scribes: and [some] of them ye shall kill and crucify; and [some] of them shall ye scourge in your synagogues, and persecute [them] from city to city: That upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel unto the blood of Zacharias son of Barachias, whom ye slew ..."

Am I their judge? No, I need mercy myself and it is only obtained at the foot of the cross on which "his own" placed Him because they "received Him not".
Their persecutor? No, the Lord not only prophesied it but fulfills the prophecies as well in order to accomplilsh His purpose in them. They are portrayed as my persecuters.
Mat 23:36 “Verily I say unto you, All these things shall come upon this generation."

But neither am I deceived. Jesus said they would crucify the prophets, they did (or Jesus is the liar the Jews claim he is); persecute and scourge from city to city, they did. They left Paul for dead, slew James the brother of John and crucified the Apostles to the ends of the earth, etc.

Scripture and the God of Truth does not gloss that over or endorse lying to deny anti-Christ acts either.
Witness:
Rom 11:3 “Lord, they have killed thy prophets, and digged down thine altars; and I am left alone, and they seek my life” And
1Th 2:15 “Who both killed the Lord Jesus, and their own prophets, and have persecuted us; and they please not God, and are contrary to all men”:

That said it does not ignore:
Gal 1:4 “Who gave himself for our sins, that he might deliver us from this present evil world, according to the will of God and our Father”: Tts 2:14 "Who gave himself; for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify unto himself a peculiar people..."

Or that the killing viewed as a triumph by Satan and the Jews was employed to accomplish God's purpose:
1Jo 2:2 And he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for [the sins of] the whole world.

Furthermore if they did not kill Him, who qualifies for the following very specific promise/prophecy?
Zec 12:10 “And I will pour upon the house of David, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the spirit of grace and of supplications: and they shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him, as one mourneth for [his] only [son], and shall be in bitterness for him, as one that is in bitterness for [his] firstborn.”
Be certain to note here that the speaker is "me whom they have pierced" the God of the Old Covenant is no different from the God of the New.

When did the Roman government qualify as "the house of David" or the "inhabitants of Jerusalem"?

"Our God reigns!"

16 posted on 04/01/2005 8:59:28 AM PST by Spirited (God, Bless America and save Israel)
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