I really try to avoid political issues except when I think issues that are personal become political, and then I just get really mad. Terri Schiavo is my case in point.
What does Congress, the Florida Legislature, Governor Jeb Bush, or anyone else in the world who has never met Terri, her husband or her family have any business saying anything about what should be done with what remains of her life? What right does anyone have to make a political football, a new venture into the tricky territory of legislating what are personal decisions for the religious right? None. That's the problem. None of us, no matter how much we may 'care' about the bigger issue, should have any say in what happens to this poor woman.
Can you imagine how painful it is for her husband to have to see his wife everyday in a vegetative state that he knows in his heart should would not want to be maintained in. What good is keeping her alive doing anyone? I can understand her family wanting to hold out for a miracle but reality is that after ten years, the chances are so slim (see one can never say never). And while all these people say they are thinking of Terri, to me they are just being selfish.
Wouldn't you just love to ask them what they would want done if they were brain dead? Do you think they would answer honestly or would they follow party lines and just say, 'Oh, I'd love to be kept on life support and lay there, motionless, thoughtless, without any connection to the world outside of that old feeding tube for the rest of my days.“
It's so sad and unfortunate for the family involved. The parent's who are so afraid to let go, to admit that their daughter really is in a vegetative state. The husband who's doing the most painful and only truly humane thing he can do for the woman he loves. For the rest of us, let's just leave them alone. Let Terri go in peace. Drop the political pretenses, the pandering to the right for votes and Senate seats. Stop the ignorant protests by people jumping on the moral bandwagon without so much as a true iota of personal involvement in the last ten year's of Terri's life. Really. The only answer is to put Terri's life into the hand's of G-d (if you believe in this entity) and take the man-made machines out of the question. That, and only that, is the moral imperative. G-d speed Terri. G-d speed.
Posted by robdesign at March 19, 2005 07:22 AM