Goodbye, Mrs. Schiavo

I want to speak of the matter of Theresa Schiavo one more time, and I hope to do so in a respectful manner. There have been too many unpleasant words spoken on the subject.

The problem is that there are two very different stories here. In fact, there are two different people under discussion.

Terri Schindler-Schiavo was brain-damaged to some extent, but still described as "lucid". She responded to voices and to touch in an obviously meaningful fashion, and occasionally spoke, inarticulately but with obvious intent. Her evil husband plotted to kill her for $700,000 of insurance money, and ignored all pleas on her behalf. He claimed that she would not want to live under such conditions, but he had no corroboration for the claim. He injected her with insulin to try to hasten her death, muttering "When is the bitch going to die?"

Mrs. Theresa Schiavo was severely brain-damaged and had no consciousness. The place once occupied by her cerebral cortex was filled with fluid and scar tissue. Her eyes did not track, she did not respond to sound or to touch. She had said to her husband and to various other persons that she did not want to be kept alive artificially under such conditions, and her husband stood by her in spite of harassment, death threats and even offers of money that ran as high as ten million dollars.

Those are the two lives we have been offered by the media. Depending on which channel you tuned in, you heard one or the other. Any decent human being would reach out to Terri Schindler-Schiavo, and millions did. The problem is, the two versions of reality are not equally valid. As with evolution vs. creationism, orweapons of mass destruction in Iraq, there comes a time when a reasonable person is forced to say, "This is reality, and the other side of the argument is proven false by overwhelming evidence."

Terri Schindler-Sciavo was a fictional character created by wishful thinking (on her parents' part) and political expediency (on the part of people like Randall Terry and Tom DeLay, who had agendas of their own). The tragedy of Theresa Marie Schiavo is the reality, period.