Posted on 03/21/2005 3:35:30 AM PST by goldstategop
The steaks and salmon are sizzling. Mushrooms and onions are sautéed in butter and garlic. Corn is steamed; butter melted. Pasta is boiling and sauce bubbling. It smells so good.
Terri Schiavo won't smell them.
Salad is tossed in dressing and adorned with feta cheese. Crusty bread and butter await, and a fine wine is uncorked and left to breathe. Coffee brews and tea steeps while desserts tempt the eye and palate.
Terri Schiavo won't taste them.
Our lives go on. We eat and drink and sleep and wake and smile and cry and love and hate.
And Terri Schiavo is dying – not because her natural time has come but because the system decided she must. They haven't asked her. They ignore and demean her parents and siblings who want Terri to continue to live.
Terri Schiavo, the afternoon of March 18, began her journey to death. Not from disease or injury or age – she's only 41. Her food and water have been stopped, and a grisly deathwatch has begun. Terri is deliberately being starved and dehydrated to death.
She is not a prisoner of a demented killer or angry enemy, or even of a terrorist.
She is, however, a prisoner of her in-name-only husband. He has a live-in girlfriend, two children with her and calls her his fiancée, whom he intends to marry as soon as Terri is dead.
Terri's also a prisoner of a system that has decided she will die. The system will not deliberately kill her, and by that I mean deliver the deathblow via poison or other means. No, that would be illegal.
But the system will kill her. The method of death – in the year 2005, in this first-world country with the best medical system in the world – for this young woman, who has nothing wrong with her except a damaged brain, is deliberate starvation and deprivation of fluids.
It's almost impossible to believe that her feeding tube, which has nourished and hydrated her for 15 years – since her mysterious injury in her own apartment with her husband the only witness – has been removed. She will lie in bed until she dies. It could take three weeks.
As I write this, people across the country are eating their meals and drinking their beverages. They'll go to bed in peace to dream their way to another day.
And then there's Terri Schiavo.
Who is she? Funny you should ask. If it's only now you're hearing about her – and it's not because her story hasn't deserved telling. It's because until now, mainstream media – and indeed, most media, of whatever political stripe – have ignored Terri.
Her story is tough – one that media, especially television, tend to ignore. The cameras want people who are sympathetic. They can't empathize with someone who is "funny looking" and can't take care of herself.
You'd be "funny looking" if you suffered a mysterious injury that left you brain-damaged and unable to speak or swallow.
You'd be "funny looking" if you spent the last 15 years virtually a prisoner of the person you married, who promised one day long ago to love and honor you in sickness and in health and to care for you forever.
Many believe Terri's husband tried to strangle her that night 15 years ago. Many believe that's why Michael Schiavo won't divorce her, won't allow her rehabilitative therapy, wants her dead and has ordered immediate cremation.
You'd be "funny looking" if that person refused you medical treatment, medical tests, dental care, physical therapy, open windows, walks outside, visits from your parents and other family members and friends, free practice of your religion and reception of the sacraments of your faith.
Terri Schiavo is that person and she is "funny looking" but only if you regard her infirmity as a measure of her humanity. I don't, but many do. I've heard from them. They look at Terri, see she's disabled and on that basis decide she'd be better off dead. "Who would want to live that way?" they harrumph. "I wouldn't."
Well, OK. But this isn't about you. It's about Terri and her family members who love her and want to care for her, regardless of her infirmity or how she looks.
Terri's parents look at her and see their baby who grew into a beautiful young woman and who, in her early 20s, was taken from them by a mysterious brain injury. Her brother and sister see the person they grew up with. They want to care for Terri but her husband, Michael, refuses.
Many look at Terri and decide that she is "trapped" in her body and should be "allowed to die" or be "put out of her misery." It's the same line: "No one would want to live that way."
Yes, but she is in that body. What if she's aware of everything that's going on? What if she doesn't want to die but can't tell us? What is the measure of the decision on who should live or die? Is it the condition of our bodies? If so, every disabled person, sick person and old person is in danger.
We don't do that to pets or other animals. We wouldn't be allowed to do that to terrorist prisoners or other war captives. It would be considered cruel, unusual and inhumane.
But for Terri Schiavo, the unthinkable is not only thinkable but possible and, as I write this, is taking place under the protection of the law as ordered by the courts of Florida. Both the State and the U.S. Supreme Courts have declined to intervene.
Efforts are under way in Congress to put a stop to it but thus far, Florida Circuit Court Judge George Greer, in ignoring a congressional subpoena, has essentially said, "Stick it in your ear." He said Terri will die, and so she will.
Unless all those prayers for her life are answered. It will take a miracle. And I weep.
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
Stop the melodrama already. Thousands of unborn children get killed each year without even tasting mother's milk and we continue to live somehow...
Auschwitz, Elian ... Terri
The ACLU has helped this guy Michael Schiavo in his court battle to get Terri's food tube removed. Has anyone looked into the area of this judge Greer and his connection to the ACLU? I think there is one. If there is, then his judgment may be set aside for reasons of conflict of interest.
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
Yes, we continue to live, but must we continue to live unchanged in the face of these horrors? At the very least, we should pray, and there are many more things we can do to improve this culture of death.
This article may awaken the recognition that we are all obligated to act...
Will you love her, comfort her, honor and keep her, in sickness and in health, for richer, for poorer, for better, for worse, in sadness and in joy, to cherish and continually bestow upon her your heart’s deepest devotion, forsaking all others, keep yourself only unto her as long as you both shall live?
Precisely....who beside you said that, do you know?
If I were the gov of FL or POTUS, I would send in the National Guard to physically remove Terry. I'd probably go to jail.
Barbara's dead right about that. Simpson, a former TV anchor in Oakland/San Francisco and Los Angeles, is now a talkhost on KSFO on the weekends. She has been covering the Schiavo story for over four years, all the while asking why the MSM and the non-MSM alike didn't think it was a story worth telling.
I have been an admirer of Barbara Simpson's journalistic excellence before she was a nationally known figure, even back when I was "on the plantation" in my early adulthood.
My greatest memory of her incisive interviewing skills is when she was talking with a homeless activist on a noon news show. This was during the Mitch Snyder era, when the MSM -- ever ready to tar and feather Ronald Reagan -- latched on to the idea that there were millions of uncounted homeless Americans based on Snyder's word alone (he later admitted he didn't have backing for the figure, and committed suicide some time later).
Simpson politely asked the fiftyish black woman who was a spokesmouth for "Food Not Bombs" how she came to be homeless. She said that she had come to San Francisco from her last home in St. Louis based on the promise of a job that paid a particular amount of money. When she arrived, she discovered that the job paid $9,000 less annually than she had been allegedly promised. Rather than suffer the indignity of taking that job, and not being able to afford housing in expensive SF, the woman said, she chose to live on the streets.
This, of course, dumbfounded Simpson as much as it does you, and she asked her to clarify why she would choose to live on the streets rather than take a job. The woman became pretty indignant, saying that she wasn't going to take a job that didn't pay her what her service was worth.
For a long time, I had been wondering why no reporter asked how homeless people came to be homeless. This instance in which the question was asked answered that question loud and clear -- the answer might tend to place the blame on the individual, not the government.
Amen brothers and sisters. Amen.
....and? Do you have a point?
"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."
That's great...But what do you do when 48% of the "good people" of this country continue to vote RAT time and again, over and over, atrocity after atrocity? Hmmm?
Yet I cannot help but be outraged that the law is being used to put an innocent, living human being to death in a cruel and unusual manner. Maybe it's because I've spent so much time with ALS patients and see them as the next logical group for this kind of guardian-initiated euthanasia, or maybe it's my Jewish heritage that gives me an ingrained aversion to state-sponsored killing of the helpless. Maybe it's my dedication to the principles enumerated in the Declaration of Independence. Maybe it's the influence of Hobbesean philosophy informing my political views.
Whatever it is, this case has definitely lit the fire inside of me to protest that my own government could be involved in sanctioning the snuffing out of a human life for another person's convenience.
Edmund Burke.
You do what you can.
This is an important decision, because if this is allowed to stand it won't be long until we begin culling people who are not quite perfect. The disabled, the mentally challanged, the terminally ill. The attitude will become "their life isn't worth living" and then the courts will step in.
If you are in unremitting, unbelievable pain it's one thing, if you are just "inconvenient" it's quite another.
Terri hasn't had tests that prove that her current condition is all there is for her.
And what kind of nutcase puts a human in hospice for years and years. Hospice is a 6 month, end of life facility. It's a death house. Not a long term residence/home.
You'd be "funny looking" if you suffered a mysterious injury that left you brain-damaged and unable to speak or swallow.
This had a very good title.
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