A Fair and Balanced Look at Life
Neutral Observations: The thing about people is that, when it comes to issues of a moral or ethical variety, they tend to disguise their lack of genuine knowledge on a given issue with half-hearted passion. Like the fact that they have no idea what the fuck they’re talking about will somehow be concealed if they just get really pissed off and holler. Thankfully, however, there are people like me who take an indifferent, unbiased look at the issues and report on them without a hint of opinion or personal valuation. For example, let’s look at the tragic case of Terri Schiavo, who, as you might have heard, eased into eternity last week after her feeding tube was removed two weeks prior. Most people were so caught up in the hyperbole surrounding the case and that they failed to realize the cruel irony of it all: that the woman being slowly starved to death had in fact, 15 years earlier, rendered herself thusly incapacitated by purposely starving herself. A bulimia induced heart attack, not a drunk driver or hereditary neurological disorder, was the cause of Mrs. Schiavo’s condition, a dirty fact glossed over in most commentary on the issue. Few could argue that bulimia is any less of a mental illness than schizophrenia or cacophagia, a bill that would help insure treatment for these disorders, the Wellstone-Domenici Mental Health Equitable Treatment Act has been shelved year after year as being too costly to taxpayers by the very same Congress that so grandly attempted to circumvent the judicial process in order to give Terri Schiavo the treatment they felt she deserved. A cynic might argue that some members of the legislative and executive branches of our government, when it comes to such things as euthanasia, abortion, etc, are more concerned with bandaging the after-effects than treating the root causes, but that’s not for me to decide! I am merely the funnel through which information is poured.
Got Faith?: Another interesting way of looking at the above issue — made even more compelling by the recent revelation that the Pope himself has declared he would want to be kept alive by artificial means even if he fell into a coma or a persistent vegetative state—is to ask: why are the people so passionate about prolonging life the same people who believe so fully in a glorious life after death? It reminds me of that part in Indiana Jones The Last Crusade, when Harrison Ford—as Jones—and some pissed Coptic Christian dude are seconds from being chopped up by a boat propeller, and the Christian dude, who has been assigned the task of defending the Holy Grail, says to Jones, “My soul is prepared. How's yours?” You see, being a firm believer in the divine righteousness of his action, and the rewards waiting for him upon his death, this protector of the Holy Grail is more than willing to meet his end, and even seems glad at it! You would think that the Pope, the most divine living messenger of the Catholic branch of Christianity, would have his soul plenty “prepared,” and would gladly bypass the tedium of ventilator-breathing, life-supported living. Likewise Terri Schiavo, who was portrayed in the media as a semi-devout Roman Catholic, would probably be equally “prepared” for shuffling off the mortal coil and ascending to the superuniversal happy place after 15 years of battling for life, consciously or otherwise.
No One Wants to Die: The truth, I guess, is that no one really wants to die: not me, the Pope, Terri Schiavo, really anyone. Even people who commit suicide, in most cases, truly want to continue living but are overcome by uncontrollable extraneous factors. And though a great many people in the world, the majority by far, are comforted somewhat by faith in a divine after school program for those students of earth who maintain their best behavior, few are comforted to the point of being “prepared” to really try it out. I know I’m not. The tragedy in the Schiavo case lies in the fact that she, being incapacitated, was unable to clearly express her wishes on the matter. However, our legal system, like so many of our governmental entities, is set up with a decidedly Christian-tinged aspect. Thus, in cases such as the aforementioned, when one is not able to speak for oneself, it is often left to one’s legal and spiritual partner, the spouse, to decide. In this case, Terri Schiavo’s husband Michael stated that it would not be his wife’s wish to continue living in such a state, a decision that legal battle after legal battle proved was indeed his. Again, a cynic might argue that it is somewhat ironic that many of the same people who stood up and defended “the sanctity of marriage” against the scourge of same-sex couples, were in this instance insisting that Congress or Florida Governor Jeb Bush had more jurisdiction in deciding the fate of a woman than her own husband.
