Taking a Deep Breath Before Diving Back In

I don't believe Michael Schiavo has held up his end of the bargain, I don’t think the judge upheld the law, and I think to starve anybody (anybody!) to death is barbarism. The only right thing to do under the circumstances, in my opinion, is to get Terri Schiavo out of the hands of people who have treated her badly and want to cause her death. I had to fight for that.

And I don’t think that it’s over yet. So I’ll keep fighting.

But.

This is a plea to fellow fighters to take a deep breath now, and not go running off half-cocked, lumping everybody who opposed us into the same pile, or assuming that they acted out of malice or lack of compassion or some twisted mockery of natural feelings.

The Terri Schiavo case breaks my heart for many reasons, not least because I see good people on both sides fighting for the same things, when it comes right down to it - decency, dignity, respect, autonomy, respect for human life.

Really.

Think about it.

Many of the people who sat on the other side of this were undoubtedly spurred by a horror of suffering - more specifically, needless suffering. Count me in on that. But what I see as needless suffering were the years and years that Michael Schiavo has forbidden therapy and flowers and music and visitors. The escape from that is to get her to a different facility, and give her a new guardian. But I understand the horror of feeling like you are being asked to condone needless suffering, and I have to applaud the people who picked up a stick and took a swing at it, even if they were on the other side of this. If I believed the MSM on this, I might have been on the other side.

Many of the people who raged on the other side of this were opposing the intervention of the government into obviously emotional, almost-sacred family affairs. Count me in on that, too. But the government has a duty to protect innocent people from violence and from murder. Admittedly, there have been times when a governing body has told a man he could beat his wife if he didn’t use too stout a stick – but those days are long past, and thank goodness. The only excuse I see for a government to intervene in a husband-wife dispute are those times when life and limb are in danger. If I’d believed the Old Media on this, I might have been on the other side.

And we live in a day and age when medical advances have presented us with dilemmas our grandparents never faced. It is possible now to keep bodies semi-alive for long periods of time. I don’t know anybody who wants to be held in that condition, being stared at and either fussed over or neglected, a pathetic and helpless mockery of what they used to be, and utterly powerless to do or say anything about it. Count me in on those who admit that sometimes it is best to just stop medical treatment. I’m neither Catholic nor an Orthodox Jew, but I agree whole-heartedly with their stances on this: at some point you stop fiddling with things, but you never, ever, cause the death of a patient. So many of those who fight us quite obviously think she is essentially gone and ought to be allowed to leave, for pity’s sake. I can understand that. If I believed the accounts that she was already dead for all intents and purposes, I might have been on the other side of this. But I believe that those who think that she is neither dying nor essentially dead must be given the benefit of the doubt here.

I joined BlogsForTerri early on, and I have profound respect for the dedication of the people heading that effort. The site has been invaluable to me. The access to primary documents and links to other resources and the chance to bounce arguments off each other has been important. But when I pulled the site up this morning, there I was face to face with a Wall of Shame project, designed to go after the Republicans who didn’t vote for the bills needed to give Terri Schiavo a chance.

Count me out. I don’t do Walls of Shame.

I understand the frustration and the anger. The guys running that blogsite have been throwing their whole beings into this. They’re entitled to feel exasperated. But we’re at one of those really awkward moments when a lot has finally gone right but it might be too little, too late. So fellows, please, give yourselves a chance to sleep on it, at least. Let’s not declare war on people who might be our allies in other times, in other ways.

The cold, hard fact about bills is sometimes a politician can’t see his or her way clear to sign them – and not always for the reasons you might think. I’m willing to back off and let the dust settle and then let these guys explain themselves. Sometimes the worst thing a politician can do is sign a bad bill that promises great things – but is still a bad bill, likely to cause all sorts of collateral damage. I seem to remember that President Bush, the current one, wrote in his book “A Charge to Keep” about a bill for insurance reform, I think it was, that reached his desk while he was governor of Texas. He vetoed it. He agreed there was a problem, and he agreed the problem needed to be fixed, but he saw that particular piece of legislation as likely to make things worse instead of better. So he vetoed that bill but assigned someone to find another way to fix the problem. People screamed bloody murder, but a year or two or three down the line, his alternative action had had time to do its thing, and the problem was solved, and it didn’t matter anymore that he’d blocked that one bill. I don’t know what the House and the Senate were hammering out regarding Terri Schiavo. I’ll give them a bit of wiggle room here. Not a lot, but a little bit.

The BlogsForTerri site suggests that we should consider anybody who voted nay last night as “anti-life”. Count me out. Some of them might be, but my wild guess is that they just felt pushed into an impossible corner, and voted accordingly. Maybe, given a chance, they’ll find other ways to fight the euthanasia movement, or push to have Michael Schiavo and his team and Judge Greer and his office investigated properly and thoroughly. Maybe they’ll dig in now and make sure that disabled people have at least as much protection as convicted felons. Maybe not, but I’m voting to give them a chance.

Maybe, like me, they kept hoping (and hoping) that law enforcement would go arrest somebody and end things in a more normal way. Maybe they were working furiously behind the scenes on other ways to get things done. Maybe they just got hoodwinked. Or maybe they are irretrievably opposed. I don’t know. I still can’t figure out why things had to get this crazy in the first place.

What I do know is that I can look around and see people who fought these bills, or some other part of this whole mad rush to save an innocent life no matter what it took – who are good people with big hearts who simply couldn’t see it as I do. I can look around and see that some of my opponents on this were actually fighting for noble things, or at least for abstract ideas that I consider noble. Where we parted company came into focus when Terri’s mother was standing in front of cameras and pleading with people not to use her daughter to make a point.

“Making a point” is a serious American pursuit. Perhaps it is a universal human pursuit.

Sometimes it is even a good thing.

But it is so, so easy to let it blind us to the specifics of any given situation.

This is a plea to fellow fighters to take a deep breath now, and not go running off half-cocked, lumping everybody who has opposed us into the same pile, or assuming that they all acted out of malice or lack of compassion or some twisted mockery of natural feelings or greed or something else very ugly.

The Terri Schiavo case breaks my heart for many reasons, not least of which because I see that there are some good people on both sides fighting for the same things when it comes right down to it - decency, dignity, respect, autonomy, respect for human life, compassion, the hope of a better civilization.

We can fight this battle with facts, not fury; reason, not invective; and with allies, not just followers and friends. Some people are truly our enemies. But I think we're running the risk of creating enemies where none now exist.

Not really.

Think about it.