Palpable fear? Where did you read that? Please give me the sources. I've read a lot of the links and didn't see anything of that sort.
On the contrary -- pls. reread 8mmmauser's eyewitness post #875 above -- at the vigil for Terri, the disabled were most courageous and vigorous defenders of Terri's right to live. It wasn't fear they expressed, it was moral outrage at the abuse of an innocent, helpless disabled woman, and prayer for her deliverance.
>> I have come to the conclusion that these poor folks do not trust the people in their lives who are closest to them
Eh? Again, I saw nothing like this. What did you read?
What one sees again and again -- what the disabled very vocally worry about -- is the growing social and legal acceptance of killing them just because they are handicapped. "For those of us in the organized disability rights movement, it looks like Schiavo is being put to death for the crime of being disabled." (Link, #859)
This has nothing to do with mistrusting your loved ones. Rather, the disabled are, with good reason, suspicious of lawyers, bureaucrats, politicians and a corrupt hospice industry. And who wouldn't be?
Excerpt:
... In all these cases, the phrase "will not recover" was used, it seemed to Not Dead Yet protesters, as a kind of shorthand to justify the withdrawal of life-sustaining measures.
And this, perhaps more than any other point, was one we heard made from the Not Dead Yet camp: that people who were seriously disabled with "no hope of recovery" were seen as burdens on society in terms of their costs, their medical care, their needs.
People in the disability rights movement, by and large, are people who have serious disabilities. Virtually none of them will "recover." To them, the phrase -- its constant and patently unexamined use -- signaled an attitude much in evidence throughout society: that people who could not recover would be better off dead. Or that their families, or society, would be better off -- economically, certainly -- if they were dead.
That is a hard message to hear. And even if your disability is not on the surface anything like Terri Schiavo's, even if you can think and speak and write and work, if your disability is so serious that you require a feeding tube or a breathing tube or even a catheter -- and if you're not going to recover -- you fear being treated like Terri Schiavo. Maybe sooner, if you're admitted to the hospital for something unrelated like pneumonia or a tubal ligation and told that you should sign a "do not resuscitate" order -- something a number of our readers have reported happening to them. Maybe later, if your disability progresses to a point where you need more equipment, more assistance. But looming always.