Thinking About Terri Schiavo

Firstly, we all might be very proud to live in a country where one human life, such as it is, is valued so much. Perhaps we should just let Terri live as a symbol of how much we value life and individual liberty; as the symbol of how we are so naturally inclined to avoid the pre-Nazi slippery slope on which individual life meant so little, except as an instrument of the state. After all, killing people by the millions has been the normal course of human history. Terri in some ways represents the culmination of the long road toward freedom and individual liberty on which people and individuals mattered more and more, and gov't, and the mass slaughter it always causes, matters less and less.

Or, perhaps we should let her live just to confound a liberal world which has come to believe America's heart is somehow essentially evil? Or, perhaps we should let her live to remind us that it is the Republicans who seems to care and vote from their hearts to save life while the liberals are so empty and silent and cold. Is it the same sentiment that allows liberals not to care about 1 million aborted babies a year? Or, perhaps we should just let her live because her parents and family still want to love and be with their daughter regardless of her IQ? Imagine that kind of love in contrast to the deadly violence that has animated almost all of human history.

Terri's story is inexplicable in so many ways. Is she really different from many of the 2000 people who die every day in this country? Why this one case above all the others? We don't really know. It is like asking how Angelina Jolie got to be the most beautiful woman in the world or how Scott Peterson got to be the most infamous murder this year. These things result from a complex interplay between media and consumers. In many ways they represent our inability to be conceptual, and in the case of Terri, our wish to look into our own tragic futures. We find dealing with beauty, or murder, or death in general, on a conceptual level difficult and unfulfilling, but deal with them we must since they are ever present and ever important. We deal with them through one obvious individual case at a time so as to be forthright and honest, and yet as non-conceptual as suites our natural mental processes.

The specific case against Terri is simple. The courts have found, based on nearly meaningless hearsay evidence, from an insanely relentless exhusband, with a personal grudge and financial motives, that Terri would want to die in a situation like the one she is now in, and so her individual liberty must be honored over the liberty of her family and her society. And, on some level, we understand the natural progression of the sentiment expressed on behalf of Terri is that one day we might all value life so much that we will all want to be kept alive as long as possible, in any form possible, and by any technological means possible. It would simply be too expensive and ultimately represent a significant conflict with all the other things the money might buy.

This debate between the quality and quantity of life has always gone on, albeit less publicly than now. In many senses it is astonishing how, despite the flourishing of individual liberty, the quality of life seems to have won out in general. For example, we have a billion dollars to spend on Oreo Cookies each year, to pick just one silly brand among 1000s, which arguably might be better spent on cancer research or general health care. In the end the many moments of life speak to us louder than the few moments of death. We know death is coming but still we have found that an Oreo cookie is the better medicine.

It seems certain now that we will honor what we think of as Terri's wish to die a slow death of dehydration. Conversely, if we could save her or even cure her, and the other 2000 human beings who will die today, would we? Indeed the absence of death would create even greater problems. Populations would rise dramatically, and we would be inclined to put everything off until tomorrow. Time, always our greatest adversary and reference point, would cease to have meaning, except perhaps as a way to measure the boredom.

So somehow we muddle on as we are: congratulatory that we cared, proud of what we have become, sad that she must die tragically as we all must die, but still somehow finding some way and some reason to enjoy the coming spring. Perhaps in the end it is children that are at the heart of what keeps us going despite all that we know. We must provide for them, we owe them a future, and most importantly, we must share and give meaning to their youthful joy and innocence. Without the springtime of life that they bring to us, there would be very little to counterbalance the end of life that Terri so strongly suggests to us.
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