[News] It's Not About Terri Schiavo

[News at freedomarchives.org]

Published on Monday, March 21, 2005 by the Laura Flanders Show

  It's Not About Terri Schiavo
from the March 20th, 2005 Laura Flanders Show

  About that posturing in Congress on Palm Sunday, I've got just one thing 
to say: it's not about Terri Schiavo.

  Accidentally in uttering the words "she's my life," in her conversation 
with the media Terri Schiavo's mother revealed what's at the very heart of 
this whole dismal story. None of this is about poor brain-destroyed Terri 
Schiavo. It's all about someone else's life, or various someone-elses.

  Tom DeLay knows nothing about morality or ethics. He dragged congress 
back to Washington for a special session so he could put his fellow members 
through a loyalty test on Palm Sunday. According to Robert Novak (who, as 
we know, knows these folks) analysts at the RNC sent out a warning this 
week to the House of Representatives that the GOP's in danger of losing 25 
seats in the 2006 election. The Schiavo case "is a great political issue" 
for Republicans, anonymous advisors told party senators in an unsigned memo 
this weekend. It isn't about Terri Schiavo's life; it's about the life of 
this GOP-ruled congress.

  It isn't about Terri Schiavo, it's about tossing a bone to poor Christian 
voters who voted Republican this November but haven't gotten a thing for 
those votes so far, except a slap around the face with another brass 
knuckle budget and tougher treatment for poor folks who go bankrupt. It's 
about performing compassion when this congress is really only-and-all about 
profits. And it's about obscuring the corruption and fraud on which Delay's 
power is built, and hoping poor voters will forget that once they've cast 
their votes, the GOP doesn't care about them anymore. Their first order of 
business is well, business.

  It isn't about what DeLay calls "a culture of life." When he was governor 
of Texas, George Bush signed into effect a law that grants hospitals the 
right to cut off life support in cases that are even more controversial 
than Schiavo's. Under Texas law, hospitals can cease to feed a patient 
whose prognosis is so poor that further care would be futile if that 
patient has no way to pay his or her medical expenses. A baby was pulled of 
life support under that legislation this past week, against his mother's 
wishes. It was ok with the National Right to Life committee in 1999 and it 
was ok with Governor George W. Bush. What changed? Only political expediency.

  What do you think this is really about? Terri Schiavo? I don't think so. 
I think it's about distracting from lawlessness and dying in Iraq and 
Afghanistan. It's about changing the subject from a cruel and killing 
budget, and just possibly, about obscuring the news that according to a new 
National Defense Strategy" the Pentagon has made "first strike" attacks 
like those used in Iraq a permanent piece of the nation's military policy.

  Talk about a culture of life. If the Bush crew really believed human life 
was sacred, they would never have okayed the loss of hundreds of thousands 
of Iraqi lives because of the off-chance that the future might bring 
another terror attack, somewhere, sometime, that might kill Americans. 
Forget the WMD threat which did not exist. Bush made the argument again 
this past week that it's better to fight terrorism abroad (and kill 
innocent people there now) than tolerate the possibility that more US lives 
might be lost here at some unspecified time in the future.

  Bush's criminal congress isn't about a culture of life any more than 
Bush's unilateral war against world majority opinion was about democracy or 
global security.

  Besides, when was the last time you think that any one of Bush's criminal 
congress took a moment to imagine what it would actually be like to be 
Terri Schiavo? We can all understand where Schiavo's mother is coming from, 
but it's not actually her mother's suffering that's at stake here, or Tom 
Delay's or the Congress's. It's Schiavo's, and I'd say it was a long time 
since the people in this picture actually put themselves in Schiavo's shoes 
because as far as I can see, this nation's out of the habit of practicing 
empathy.

  Plastic pathos, sure, and for-profit compassion -- there's plenty -- but, 
actual honest-to-your-god empathy? You tell me. I think "do unto others as 
you'd have others do unto you" is on life support in George W. Bush's 
America. Don't believe me? Ask the Afghans. Ask the Iraqis. And maybe I'm 
going out on a limb here, but if you could, I'd say you could ask Terri 
Schiavo.

  Laura Flanders is host of The Laura Flanders Show, heard weekends on Air 
America Radio and the author of BUSHWOMEN.

© 2005 Laura Flanders

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