The Tragedy of Terri Schiavo

She's the woman who's been in a persistent vegetative state since she suffered a stroke when she was around 30. Some decade has passed, and her husband won the right to disconnect her feeding tube (against the wishes of her parents who do not provide her primary care and who feel their former son-in-law is a terrible person for resuming his life after a few years) only to have Jeb Bush intercede and then get the Florida Congress to create a special law just to give Chubby Jebby the right to do this.

Another court has decided that Florida's reps had no right to do this (God, it's nice to know something is illegal there since interfering with the right to vote and keeping a little boy from his father in Cuba isn't). But Chubby Jebby says no, he's going to overrule the court.

I've seen the video that Ms. Schiavo's parents use to try to prove she's capable of coming back. It's moving. You see her as a very real person. But that's true of almost every person whose brain is gone. Something of what made them real and human remains so long as their breathing does.

But can any of us imagine having to live for more than a decade like Ms. Schiavo has done? This issue touches home for me. My dad died before his body died. Three rapid brain hemorrhages destroyed everything that made him who he was. For the days before his body died too, it was especially terrible for my family because my father (although under 40) had repeatedly said that he'd rather be shot than be a vegetable. And of course you hope for a miracle. But miracles are pretty rare when most of the brain is no longer functioning.

Even at not quite five, I got a quick education on why there are worse things than physical death. It would have been terrible for everyone concerned, but most of all, for the spirit of who my father was, had he been forced to stay alive mechanically. In his case, however, he was in a US vet hospital and even then (four decades before War Bushie got his hands on the DoD budget, the government wasn't going to take extraordinary measures to keep a vet alive when there was no hope of real life.

Jeb is using this case to appeal to his far right base who wants life preserved at any cost unless of course they decide to execute someone. He'll never care for or take care of this woman. He wasn't there for a decade of preserving her physically when she made no progress away from her irreversible situation.

He has no right to do what he's done. Someone needs to stop him. Someone needs to tell all these privileged Bushies that we're not just chess pieces in the game of their political careers.