The Schiavo Death Watch
Like Doc Higgins in a prior post, I hate this case. It should never have gotten to this point and, as the Doc said, this poor lady died years ago. It's the Karen Quinlan story all over again. The politics makes it much uglier. The Repubs look like opportunistic vultures, and the Dems begin to look like the Party of Death, with abortion and Terri. Haven't I always said that politicians are crowd manipulators and dream twisters? As Kissinger said, "90% of politicians give the other 10% a bad name." It is a disgusting spectacle, filled with yellow journalism, and the whole thing is sad as hell.
The entire story is complicated by the fact that Terri Schiavo doesn't look dead, even though she's long gone. It is called a "coma vigil" in medicine. Most people with her degree of brain destruction are on respirators and totally unresponsive.
The truth is that, as the Dems seem to be willing to acknowledge, a "person" is not a body - a person is the heart and soul and spirit of a person. The body is just a vessel - a fact which everyone who has performed surgery, including me, many times - knows well. The body is a complicated hunk of meat and bone and guts which miraculously works pretty well, most of the time.
But the trouble is that we've seen that concept abused over history, haven't we? It has seemed easy, over history, for people to decide that a Moslem, a Jew, an African, an unborn baby, a grievously ill person, or an American, has no real soul and is just a disposable biological unit like a laboratory rat. To Al Quaida, we are "the other" - we are Terri Schiavos to them as the Jews were to Stalin and Hitler. There is a path to the de-humanization culture - the soul-less culture - the death culture - that we must not take. And it is "reason" and science - not religion - that beckons us, in Western Civilization, down that ugly, "Brave New World," "rationalist" path.
So the subject is complex. However, note to world: If I end up like that, please be merciful and let me go to complete my journey through this world. There. It's official. It is written on a blog!
My cynical take on what is going on is that, with Iraq wrapped up, the press needed a new hot topic, and the Michael Jackson trial just didn't do it, because no-one cared. They found a new hot drama, and the lens-lice put on clean shirts and new Gucci neckties and lined up for the cameras. But the real subject and the real debate is about the sanctity of God-given life, and Terri, through her extended departure of soul and body, has given us the gift of raising this issue in public.
May her soul rest in peace.
