I get so tired of the excuse that Terri is PVS, so she has the "right" to die with "dignity." Even if Terri were PVS (and I don't believe she is), does that mean she deserves to die of starvation? Is that how these disrupters would want to die? What kind of person would starve another living human being to death? What harm can there be in MS giving her a divorce and letting her go home with her parents?
Anyone who wants Terri to die needlessly should read a very important book, The Power of the Powerless. But I wonder if they'd understand what the author was trying to say.
Here is an excerpt of the article that starts the book:
Power of the Powerless: A Brother's Lesson
By Christopher de Vinck
I grew up in the house where my brother was on his back in his bed for almost 33 years, in the same corner of his room, under the same window, beside the same yellow walls. Oliver was blind, mute. His legs were twisted. He didn't have the strength to lift his head nor the intelligence to learn anything.
Today I am an English teacher, and each time I introduce my class to the play about Helen Keller, "The Miracle Worker," I tell my students about Oliver. One day, during my first year teaching, a boy in the last row raised his hand and said, "Oh, Mr. de Vinck. You mean he was a vegetable."
I stammered for a few seconds. My family and I fed Oliver. We changed his diapers, hung his clothes and bed linen on the basement line in winter, and spread them out white and clean on the lawn in the summer. I always liked to watch the grasshoppers jump on the pillowcases.
We bathed Oliver. Tickled his chest to make him laugh. Sometimes we left the radio on in his room. We pulled the shade down over his bed in the morning to keep the sun from burning his tender skin. We listened to him laugh as we watched television downstairs. We listened to him rock his arms up and down to make the bed squeak. We listened to him cough in the middle of the night.
"Well, I guess you could call him a vegetable. I called him Oliver, my brother. You would have liked him."
... Even now, five years after his death, Oliver remains the weakest, most helpless human being I ever met, and yet he was one of the most powerful. He could do absolutely nothing except breathe, sleep and eat; yet he was responsible for love, courage and insight.
The rest of the aricle is here and elsewhere on the internet:
Terri is an innocent woman and does not deserve a death sentence!
Thank you for that post.
"The Power of the Powerless"
I am speechless after that post.