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March 28, 2005
A News Watch
is on. An earthquake of 8.7 magnitude struck late Monday off the west
coast of Indonesia. Described as one of the four or five “greatest
earthquakes of the past century,” Kerry Sieh, a seismologist with the
United States Geological Survey, predicts, “…a Tsunami has a 100
percent chance of hitting.”
Officials in
Indonesia
are just now beginning to report damaged buildings and lives lost.
Reporters on Fox News read from their scripts. As dawn breaks on the
other side of the world, they tell us we could again be facing,
“serious death and destruction.”
Meanwhile, a
tsunami of a different kind has been unleashed in America this past
week. Born on the waves of the pain of one family, this tidal
wave threatens destruction of proportions dwarfing the death toll from
December’s Indonesian tsunami disaster when at least 273,000 people
lost their lives.
The American
Tsunami is due to take its first victim any time now. Terri Schiavo’s
life is washing out to sea, one small life sacrificed for lack of a
justice system that will uphold her right to live.
Her case is a
harbinger of things to come. As Americans rush to call their
attorneys and download living wills from the Internet, Terri’s case
proves we live under the tyranny of a judicial system that has no need
of advance directives. Terri left no such set of instructions to
guide her care, yet we pretend we know what she wants.
Seven years after
she fell into her coma, her husband suddenly remembered that Terri
didn’t want to live. There is no written will, no signature, and no
directive. It is the word of one man who wants to get on with his
life…against the silence of one woman whose life hangs in the
balance. The man will win. The woman will die.
Brace yourself.
This Tsunami is building and gathering force. It threatens to unleash
widespread death and destruction on Americans who will be unable to
justify their worth to a world demanding function and profit. This is
not just about Terri. Millions of human lives are at risk.
We will have years
to unravel the details about Terri’s case that have gone largely
unreported in the mainstream media. We will learn how easy it is to
hire two expert witnesses to say a life is worthless and to get one
death-prone judge to agree. We will find all sorts of soft words to
describe the process of killing. And we will build a cadre of
physicians who are willing to assist in the administration of death.
And just to make
sure that we can live with ourselves, we will paint pretty pictures of
death by force. It will be quiet. It will be compassionate. It will
be merciful. But mostly, it will be profitable.
The day is not too
far off when some compassionate judge will set aside your written
directive to live. Some relative who wants to preserve his
inheritance or some hospital administrator who wants to improve the
bottom line will show up in court. The judge will agree with a
well-paid lawyer that you would really want to die if you had known
what life would come to when you mistakenly signed your living will.
And you will die.
It’s happened
before. In 1942, just as German mental patients were being finished
off, Dr. Foster Kennedy, wrote his recipe for death in the official
publication of the American Psychiatric Association. “Parents who
have seen the difficult life of a crippled or feebleminded child must
be convinced that though they have the moral obligation to care for
the unfortunate creatures, the wider public should not be obliged…to
assume the enormous costs that long-term institutionalization might
entail.”
The News Watch
is on. In the coming days, we will witness the results of the
potential Indonesia tsunami in an immediate wave of destruction. Many
may die. We will mourn. And we will rebuild.
In America, the
coming week will pass quietly. One American woman will die for lack
of food and water…because one man said she would have said she wanted
to die, if she could have said she wanted to die, even though she
didn’t say she wanted to die. And we won’t need to mourn, because we
did it for her good.
Terri’s death will
be the crashing force of an earthquake happening miles below the
water’s surface. And seismologist Kerry Sieh’s words spell out the
pending disaster both for Indonesia…and for America. "I would guess
that this has produced significant tsunamis and that there will be
significant damage.”
Copyright © 2005 Jane Jimenez
Abstinence education at its heart is built
on the highest regard and respect
for the value of each human being.
May we continue to foster in our children
the love of life...our own...and the lives of others.
Affirmation of life is the spiritual act by which man ceases to live
thoughtlessly and begins to devote himself to his life with reverence in
order to give it true value. To affirm life is to deepen, to make more
inward, and to exalt the will to live. At the same time the man who has
become a thinking being feels a compulsion to give to every will to live
the same reverence for life that he gives to his own. He experiences that
other life in his own. He accepts as good preserving life, promoting
life, developing all life that is capable of development to its highest
possible value. He considers as evil destroying life, injuring life,
repressing life that is capable of development. This is the absolute,
fundamental principle of ethics, and it is a fundamental postulate of
thought.
-Albert Schweitzer
See more quotes
Worth Repeating.
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