Now that the US Supreme Court has decided not to issue an emergency order to reconnect the feeding tube for Terri Schiavo, all that’s left is for her to die. No doubt there are other similar cases throughout the country, just without all the publicity. It is a mystery, though not a complete one, why some cases receive publicity and interest, and others languish outside the limelight. This is often cited as a right to die case or a right to life case, but to me it seems more of a lack of proper law coupled with a case of incompetence coupled with a case of husband wanting money and new wife.

My biggest problem with the case is that any court would try to ascertain someone’s intent to live or die based on off-hand remarks and not written instructions when the mechanism for written instructions exist and that a court would find clear intent when there is complete disagreement between a husband on one hand and all of his wife relatives on the other. 

Given her age, I think it likely that Terri never gave much thought to whether she wanted to live or die in this situation, so to fish around in people’s recollections for off-hand remarks and impressions and have her life depend on what one person makes of all that strikes me as the height of hubris and folly. No legal system should have a judge in that position. A judge made a finding of fact about a decision when there is no real evidence that such a decision was ever made. It’s not like deciding who pulled a trigger or who robbed a bank. If anything comes of all this, I would hope that it is every state passes a law to keep such legal wrangling from happening again – and I would use the old legalism, if it wasn’t said in writing, it was never said at all. 

I think it illustrates several things – one of which is that there does seem to be a huge divide in this country. And too often both sides are too busy being partisan to listen to what the other side is saying. Here you have people who don’t have any problems with appeals that stretch out for more than a decade in a death penalty case, and in so doing have no trouble thinking that courts make mistakes all the time, claim that seven years is too long because it’s not like a court would make a mistake.

Another is that this divide is fed by an information gap — the information that the two sides of this issue are using are completely different. I can’t say this often enough or strongly enough, but the mass media in this country is terrible.  Awful. They suck. There’s a reason why the oath to testify is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and no reporter ever wants to be under oath to testify. It just isn’t in them to tell the whole truth and nothing but. They’ve been misinforming me my entire life and it would be folly on my part to expect them to change now. 

So instead we have one narrative told by the mainstream media, of a husband who is heroically fighting the forces of extemism so that he can fulfill his wife’s wishes, and another told in alternative media of a husband who is trying to kill his wife so that he can keep the settlement money and marry the mother of his two children. And on the one hand, the wife’s condition is clearly that of a vegetable, not only is nobody home but the lights are pretty dim; and on the other we have a woman at best not properly diagnosed to at worst misdiagnosed, refused any treatmant by her husband to hasten her departure, who does have some mental capacity. It’s like the bring-out-your-dead scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where Eric Idle wants someone hauled off to the ash heap even though he isn’t dead yet. And the mortician does Eric a favor by bashing the guy over the head before taking his body away. Only this time, it isn’t funny.