In the final two weeks of March 2005 we saw a particular group of people rallying behind the parents of Terri Schiavo and protesting the courts and government to bring their daughter back, even though their daughter was long gone. The reality was that Terri Schiavo’s life sadly ended fifteen years earlier along with the pretty photographs of her the media kept showing on the news. The shriveled up 2005 Terri on the verge of physical death had been in the process of demise the last fifteen years, and which was only prevented by an artificial plastic tube that fed her artificial food. It’s hard for parents to let go of a daughter, no doubt, but they were only hanging onto a shell of what was their daughter. This is the first problem: America’s fear of death, contradictory to the fact that we consume violence in our entertainment and bomb other countries with no regard when all the while the people who protest this are called “crazed and unpatriotic.” We fear death as if we were tied to the tracks in a dark tunnel and we never knew when the next train without headlights would come thundering through.
When Terri Schiavo finally did die, after ten years of her poor husband fighting to free her of the artificial feeding tube, her family was forced to face her death, the entropy they couldn’t face fifteen years earlier. The protestors then put down their signs that read “Terri is not brain dead,” (even though her brain had reached atrophy according to seven of the top neurologists in the world.) Other signs read “Stop starving Terri” (even though no one starved her except nature). And these protestors continued on with their mission, marching to the next abortion clinic to harass poor women who are in fact still alive, while today another soldier will die in Iraq, and tomorrow another person will die because they don’t have any health coverage, and next month another criminal will be put to death in America on death row for killing someone else. The nuts are fighting the wrong battle.
This brings us to the next problem— America’s addiction to hypocrisy. We showed the world how one American woman, kept alive artificially, is worth more than 500,000 Iraqi children killed in the 1990’s because of the Gulf War and its resulting sanctions, worth more than the 1 million civilians killed in the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, worth more than the 2 million civilians killed in Vietnam by Americans, at least in terms of press and acknowledgment.
This country continues to amaze the world. Everyone pays more attention to one dying woman than all of the soldiers who have died in Iraq. How come the soldiers don’t get 24-hour television coverage? How come we aren’t allowed to see and salute the flag draped coffins of our heroic troops as they’re shipped home? How come the people protesting the war to save these soldiers are disregarded by many as unpatriotic? Of course, our president hops on an immediate flight in the middle of the night to try and save Terri, when it took him 3 days to call Asia after they had just suffered the worst human casualties from a natural disaster ever. Are the Asians not as valuable too? As the president was rushing off to save one woman in his brother Jeb’s state, an entire community was grieving in Minnesota over the worst school shooting in history since Columbine. Why didn’t Bush hop on an immediate flight to Minnesota? Is it because the school happens to be predominantly Native American; are they too not as valuable? Or is it because Bush supports the right to bear arms, hence someone else’s right to take another’s life? Instead, Bush went running to his conservative-Christian supporters to save a life, even though he didn’t save any lives in Iraq when he lied about WMD, even though he didn’t save any lives when he executed more inmates than any other governor in history, executions that include a mentally retarded woman and a majority of blacks and Hispanics. Now once again, Bush couldn’t save a life. He must have felt like a failure, a phony that let down the very people who made sure he became president.
The truth is that Terri died from irreversible brain damage. The Schiavo autopsy later proved the skeptics wrong. She was in a persistent vegetative state with “massive and irreversible brain damage and she was blind.” So much for those who said she was visually responding to family members. The autopsy also found no evidence of abuse or strangulation, which many of the extremists had accused Mr. Schiavo of. Furthermore, the brain weighed 615 grams, about half of a normal human brain, which proves the massive loss of neurons. Yet despite the evidence, many religious groups including the Roman Catholic Church disagreed and still disagree with the final decision to free Terri of her artificial life.
If I’m ever in a horrible situation where I’m being artificially kept alive for a period of over six months with no chance of returning to a functional life and this is agreeable by more than one doctor, please pull the plug or cut the tube. Now it’s in writing. Any longer than six months is a burden to the world, a waste of energy, and a down-right nasty tease to the hope of my loved ones. If I can’t feed myself and chew my own food after a few months of recovery, then I don’t want to survive. If you, on the other hand, wish to be propped up and artificially kept alive, let us all know— we’ll find someone sadistic enough to hold onto you and keep you dangling on by a thread for decades. Chances are we’ll find them in the Bush administration.
