The Long Farewell of a Hunger Strike : BlogsforTerri

Activists are planning hunger strikes on behalf of Terri Schiavo, among them Pamela Hennessy. Hennessy's write-up on why she is doing this, and why death by starvation and dehydration is so horrible, is available at the above link. Don't let the kids in your household go there. This is ugly stuff.

It's ugly, but it's necessary we face it. Terri Schiavo's estranged husband, inexplicably left in charge of her fate, keeps saying how peaceful and natural it is to die of starvation. He's crazy. Throughout history decent people have reserved some of their highest scorn for people who withhold food and water from others when it is available - and for reason. That Terri's killers will be on hand to rub lotion on her cracking skin hardly makes me reclassify them as kindness personified, since by the very small act of letting her leave their clutches and go elsewhere she could live for years, skin and soul intact, surrounded by people determined to give her the best life possible given her moderate neurological damage.

Other activists have laid out a thousand roses to wilt in the sun, where lawmakers can see. They hope that the symbolism will get through to people for whom this is still somehow too abstract.

Legislators for whom it is all too horribly real are scrambling to pass laws to prevent the cruel, slow, imposed deaths of disabled people in this country. Many are trying to find some way for their efforts to be in time to save Terri Schiavo's life. Help them. Write. Speak. Rally. The hospice movement began as a way to reduce the number of people dying in businesslike medical facilities, away from those humane and human touches that can ease and comfort someone's last days. The movement has been infiltrated, and to a large degree taken over, by those who are again forcing people to die in businesslike medical facilities, under 'medical supervision'. Worse yet, people like Terri Schiavo, who are neither dying nor in untreatable pain, are being targeted for no other reason than someone else has looked at them and said 'I don't think I'd really like to live like that myself, given my druthers'.

Sometimes lost in all the fuss and fury, advocates for disabled people are trying desperately to get their voices heard, saying that there are a couple of truths about disability that people ought to take into consideration in such cases. First of all, they say, people who are not disabled tend to amplify the problems associated with disability. In other words, it's often not as bad as it looks. And second, the disabled activists say, it usually takes time for newly disabled people to figure that out. People have to go through a period of adjustment before they know what they're talking about, before they have any idea how they can, and will, cope. In other words, at some stages of life, we shouldn't take what people say or do too seriously. Given time and encouragement, they'll get over it. They'll cope.

We all know that, at some level. We've all known people who have faced setbacks of one sort or another, from injury to illness to divorce to having their house burn down, who rage and sputter and threaten to give up - but then are fine later.

Terri, it sounds like, has learned to deal with her limits better than her faithless husband. Why should he be allowed to kill her?

As always, www.blogsforterri.com , www.terrisfight.org , and other sites are keeping abreast of what's happening and what isn't. And in case you missed my earlier post, check out what's happening at Poland for Terri at www.KoLiber.net/ts/.