The Elephant In The Living Room
By Michael R. Bowen (04/05/05)
Why the desperate insistence that Terri Schiavo die?
The claim of honoring her wishes won't wash. She may have said -- as we've probably all said, at one time or another -- that she "didn't want to live like that". But if she was really in a persistent vegetative state, then it's not mere sophistry to point out that she wasn't "living like that", because she was incapable of suffering. And since suffering requires consciousness, if she was suffering she wasn't in a persistent vegetative state.
She wasn't a burden on Michael Schiavo, both because he had the malpractice award to provide for her, and because he had the options of divorcing her or turning her over to those who were eager to assume her care.
Since she required no more extraordinary support than a feeding tube -- and here let me interject that I've placed many such tubes myself, and once was guided on a flyfishing trip by a man in whom I'd placed just such a tube a few weeks before -- she was no more on life-support than you and I. And she was not dying, so she could not be "allowed to die"; she had to be killed.
Michael Schiavo, his lawyer, and the various judges were thus demanding the killing of someone who either was not suffering or who was actually conscious but severely disabled. Why was that so affirmatively necessary when he could have walked away a free man? Why the fierce pursuit of her death? Why the demonizing of those who wanted her to live, and stood ready to assume the burden?
By the 1850s, slavery had become the exquisitely tender American boil that could not be touched. For the slaveholders, it was not enough that slavery remain legal ; any proposal which could, however remotely, be construed to suggest that slavery was anything less than perfectly normal and moral had to be met with adamant opposition. And anyone who made such proposals was vilified in the nastiest terms. In the halls of Congress a Southern legislator brutally beat an antislavery colleague. New states or territories could simply not be allowed to join the union as slavery- free entities, because why else would slavery be prohibited in those places except that it was fundamentally wrong? Politicians tried desperately to avoid the subject altogether, and whenever cornered they produced some of the shabbiest and most convoluted legislation in our history.
By the 1930s it was obvious that Germany was rearming and that Hitler was preparing to embark on the conquest of Europe. Sick and tired of war, the members of the League of Nations, and most European politicians, were determined to pretend otherwise. Winston Churchill's reward for speaking bluntly about the Nazi menace was to be ostracized and insulted with an intensity much like that visited upon today's right-to-lifers.
When, in the 1940s and 1950s, Whittaker Chambers denounced the evils of Soviet communism he was similarly slandered and ostracized. An international community determined to ignore the famines, show trials, and persecution at the hands of Stalin simply could not tolerate the probing of Chambers and his allies, few though they were.
The advocates of abortion have always been similarly touchy. Abortion must be an absolute good; there cannot be any restriction such as a waiting period, pre-abortion counseling, parental notification, or paternal consent. Even the most hideous forms, such as partial-birth abortion, must not be restricted. And those who propose restrictions are heaped with snarling abuse, and condescendingly sneered at in the media.
So today with the Schiavo case.
When a society is determined to look the other way, it always responds with fury to those who draw attention to the crime of the day. The supporters of evil are forced to alternate between declaring it a positive good and pretending it's not there at all. It's a very delicate balancing act, poised on a thin rope above a deep chasm.
The tightrope walker cannot tolerate the lightest touch or the softest breeze. And Michael Schiavo, Judge Greer, and the American media could not abide the slightest hint that Terri Schiavo deserved anything but death.
(Printer friendly version) Email: Michael R. Bowen
