Posted on 03/30/2005 9:07:57 PM PST by syriacus
It's astounding how many people want Terri Schiavo dead and aren't afraid to say so.
I got clobbered by readers who reacted to Tuesday's column about how the "culture of death" has placed its compassionate arms around Terri, the brain-damaged Florida woman who is being starved to death.
E-mail and phone calls (more than 150 at last count) are running 2-1 against me.
"It's nuts, this 'life at all costs' mentality," a caller said.
There was general agreement: Terri should die and starvation ain't so bad.
"Her parents are being very selfish by keeping her alive. Your reference to her starving like the prisoners [at] Dachau and Bergen-Belsen? Oh, come on. She will not be in any pain. She will go gently to sleep. I'm a nurse."
So let's starve death row inmates instead of killing them with lethal injections. I mean, if starvation is so gentle and painless. Ignore the faint-hearted who gripe this is "cruel and unusual" punishment.
"Her brain is mush. There has never been a case of a person being in a [persistent vegetative] state this long and having any kind of recovery. There's not gonna be a recovery. She's 40-some years old. Who's gonna take care of her? Her parents? They're going to die soon themselves."
A 1984 car crash left Terry Wallis of Mountain View, Ark., a quadriplegic. He lay silently in a "persistent vegetative state" for 19 years. Suddenly, in summer 2003, he began talking. He asked for his mother - and for a Pepsi. I spoke with his parents.
Terry Wallis' wife, after swearing she would care for him forever, left him for another man and had kids with the guy. (Sound familiar?)
Custody was given to his parents, who were often depressed. They prayed a lot.
Today, Terry Wallis is determined to walk. His daughter, Amber, 6 weeks old in 1984, is 21 and cares for him.
The most frequent gripe readers have is that I am not a doctor and so should not comment on Terri Schiavo's medical condition.
"Interesting that you put yourself above trained doctors. As a doctor myself, I find this low mentality repugnant. You and Bush spread this dribble for your own good and care nothing about Terri, her wishes or her husband. Have you, Bush and the Republicans gone brain dead? If this is the case I hope someone pulls your plug." - Bill Helton
I received many comments like that. Reading them gave me a headache - oops, I'm not a doctor. I'm not qualified to make that diagnosis. Sorry.
A neurologist from New Jersey sent me this:
"I fear that our culture will push the line further as to who should live and who should die. I fear for the old, the young, the sick and the helpless. I fear becoming one of the helpless. - Maria Choy, M.D.
Me, too. After Terri Schiavo, who will the culture-of-death vultures circle? A hint. Dr. Ronald Cranford, a neurologist whose medical opinion was key to a Florida judge ordering Terri Schiavo's feeding tube removed, was on TV this week candidly admitting he doesn't believe Alzheimer's patients have constitutional rights.
So first it's people like Terri, then the Alzheimer's sufferers, then perhaps end-stage cancer victims, and so forth.
Why not? Who would want to live like that? Are they not burdens?
Charles Dickens captured it when he had Scrooge confront the do-gooders who wanted to save the helpless, deemed worthless to Victorian England.
"If they had rather die they had better do it and decrease the surplus population."
I see you didn't bother to quote me at the beginning of your post, as most repliers do. You've left it up to me to show people what I really wrote. So I will make my words clear...
My exact words were
Note the quotes that indicate I am attributing the sentiments to Greer and Michael
If you cannot cite, your side's not right.
If you two want to be taken seriously when you discuss Terri, you could at least make an effort to spell her name correctly.
Actually, I've found a lot of Dickensian moments in this. Remember the endless lawsuit in Bleak House conducted by the law firm of Jarndyce & Jarndyce, which basically did nothing but eat up the fortune (this was also a probate matter!). There was a feeling in many 19th century novels, in fact, that falling into the hands of the law and the judiciary was practically a fate worse than death, if only because it went on a lot longer than merely dying.
Dickens may have been a "flaming liberal" of his time, but I fail to see how that negates his value. Victorian capitalism was quite savage and very close to economic libertarianism; Dickens was not a Socialist, but someone who felt that society should be a little kinder to the weak. But contemporary liberals feel that society should not be "burdened" by the weak (elderly, handicapped, unborn, etc.) and in many ways share a lot of opinions with libertarians and Ayn Rand types.
This is inevitable since taking the free market out of the equation guarantees that the costs will always rise exponentially. The politicans have three choices: (1) end health care, wherein the opposition party simply starts it up again when they're elected in overwhelming numbers by angry wel-faeries making 1994 look tame, (2) raise taxes that actually decreases revenue by crippling the economy, (3) kill off the hopeless cases and incremently lower the bar for "hopeless". There is only one logical choice from the politicans' view.
Excellent article.
You've pointed out some very specific parallels and your whole post was very informative.
Thank you.
Thanks, hellinahandcart. :-)
Yes.
Even liberals talk about slippery slopes, when it suits their purposes.
Good post
and GOOD to "see" you.
Lets move on people.
Only two posts since in the last 6 hours, yours included. I think everyone has moved on.
Anyone notice how Felos keeps flicking his tongue in his open mouth, right before he lies?
It reminded me immediately of the picture you posted.
Your "colorized version" of this debate is yet another fiction.
Don't cherry pick my posts. That's one heck of a nasty habit you have there...cherry picking anyone and everyone's written word and trying to make it all fit your agenda.
You cherry pick; ergo you've lost before you've begin.
When someone uses that as refutation,they've already lost the debate.
Unlike Terri, his adopted parents are now too old to take care of him and don't have the resources to do so even if they were able. Unlike Terri, there were no good family memories of better days playing with siblings when he was younger. He has never spoken the English language, never learned to read, never contributed anything directly to the economy. Unlike Terri and some other PVS victims, there is nothing for him to awaken from and come back to.
Is he next for feed-tube removal?
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