News From The U.S. Election Reform Movement
In Terry Schiavo Case, Republicans Urinate on 216 Years of Federalism, Usher in Era of Massive Government Meddling in the Affairs of the States An ADVOCATE EDITORIAL Employing extraordinary parliamentary procedures never before used for such a purpose, radical Republicans in the U.S. Congress have passed, in the dead of night, a bill which overrules the scientific, legal, and medical determinations of countless licensed physicians, state and federal judges (including the U.S. Supreme Court) and a small army of civilian witnesses in order to keep alive a Florida woman who has been in a persistent vegetative state--that is, scientifically brain-dead--for more than fifteen years. To understand the Terry Schiavo case, you must first understand that not a single Congressman who spoke on Schiavo's "behalf" on Sunday night gives one whit about the Florida woman or her family. People die under more tragic and contested circumstances every minute in the United States, and their unspoken and unheeded causes-- universal healthcare, an end to homelessness, federally-mandated heating for the elderly, more money for Medicaid, more money for Medicare, better prenatal care for the poor, greater federal investment in disease prevention and research--get not a single moment of airtime in the halls of Congress or on our living room television sets. No words or tears are spilled for them, or for their deaths. No woman has ever received more due process in the American legal system, or had more engines of power directed toward the investigation and rectifying of any wrongs ever committed against her, or had greater scrutiny of the moral, medical, ethical, and scientific determinations made on her behalf and in her name over the past fifteen years, than Terry Schiavo. Do not weep for Terry. Weep for a country in which the business of government is meddling in the life and times of a single brain-dead woman from Florida, rather than securing a better future for the almost three hundred million of us without such a built-in voting bloc--such unprecedented access to power-brokers and primetime darlings--as Schiavo has had these fifteen years. Jeb Bush wrote a law purely to "save" her (or his political career, no one was certain); members of Congress issued bogus, disingenuous subpoenas for her appearance before ad hoc sub-committee sessions as part of a massive, abusive-of-government stratagem to "save" her; and extraordinary remedies were sought in the legal system, even appeals to as august and nationally-minded a body as the U.S. Supreme Court, all in an effort to "save" this woman no more important, no more special, no more sacred than any of the rest of us--and make no mistake, many of the rest of us are suffering deeply, for a thousand different reasons this night--despite the fact that were Terry Schiavo able to speak (or to feel, or to think, or to dream) she undoubtedly would tell the whole ingratiating lot of aforementioned Republican meddlers to mind their own fucking business. So, she doesn't know anything about any of this. Because Terry Schiavo feels no pain. She feels no thirst. She feels no hunger. Her cerebral cortex has been, in the words of her doctors, "liquidated." And after the Florida Supreme Court ruled several days ago that her orally-transmitted "living will" would be respected--that her pre- hospitalization wish not to be kept artificially alive should the opportunity to be so sustained ever present itself--and after the same Supreme Court ruled that the wishes of her long-suffering husband and guardian would likewise be respected, Ms. Schiavo's feeding tube was finally removed on Friday. A fact which Schiavo did not and could not appreciate. It was an event which heralded, of course, a slow death by dehydration for the Florida woman--which, likewise, she does not and could not possibly apprehend, and which she cannot and will not feel as it overtakes her. Terry Schiavo is brain-dead and has been for fifteen years. The morbid, disgusting, crass, and disingenuous videos released by Ms. Schiavo's parents--who, despite their daughter's clearly- articulated wishes, aim to pointlessly keep her alive, in her persistent vegetative state, for several more decades--present to the nation (and have already presented to Republican doctors, who've callously and unprofessionally "diagnosed" Schiavo from the videos) a woman who appears to be capable of receiving and processing external stimuli. These videos are a deception, as a bevy of court-ordered doctors and disinterested judicial bodies have already found. As if calling into question the veracity of reports on global warming wasn't enough--as if denying evidence of the failure of abstinence education wasn't enough--as if opposing the teaching of evolution in elementary schools wasn't enough--as if denying for decades that nicotine is a carcinogen wasn't enough--radical Republicans have shown once again, in the Schiavo case, that they care not a whit for human life and not a whit for science, either: that the highest principle to which they adhere, for whose good graces they will always contend, is the hegemony of the platitude. Life is sacred, they say: well, whisper that to the bombs awoken from their cradles over Baghdad these last two years, to the children rendered black spots on the Arabian landscape by American computer errors--the permissible "collateral damage" of a war waged for pride, for revenge, for global influence, and for oil. Meet the modern Republican Party. The Party which stands for nothing less than the destruction of responsible American government--the end of a government which masses its resources against the greatest enemies of a civilized society: poverty, prejudice, economic stagnation and stratification, disease, civic apathy, totalitarianism--rather than serving as the pet weasel of unfathomably radical interests long (and justifiably) out of power. The Party which stands for nothing less than the belittlement and delegitimizing of honest science, and the rule, in its place, of superstitions, ignorance, anecdotes, wisely cast-off traditions, and empty rhetoric about morality from those who've done nothing substantive to combat the greatest moral issues of our time: such as, in addition to those listed above, homelessness, alcoholism, homophobia, the breakdown of public education, the crisis in health insurance, the curtailing of civil liberties, and, as ever, the increasing polarization--the ungodly and untenable stretching--of our nation's social and economic fabrics. The Party which is, in fact, the only Party of Big Government in America: sponsoring wild, misguided militaristic escapades the world over; tort reform which takes power from civilian juries; the ever- increasing federalization of the criminal justice system; government usurpation of state prerogatives in the areas of euthanasia, medical marijuana, gay marriage, and the death penalty; unprecedented corporate welfare for the oil, telecommunications, and transportation industries taken directly from the pockets of American taxpayers; a federal proscription against abortion, despite popular support for a woman's right to choose; and now, most abominably, government control over life-and-death medical decisions which can and are ably handled by American families--and, where needed, state-level judiciaries--every single day. Will nothing stop this radical Republican juggernaut? It is reducing American society to little more than a serfdom of dead philosophies, a paean to the so-called "counter-revolution" whose first casualties have been science, logic, reason, and equity-- and whose last casualty will undoubtedly be the long-accepted reality of American hegemony. Make no mistake, America is dying. Its reserves of courage, intellectual honesty, and fidelity to founding principles are hemorrhaging. And the fat white men who believe in nothing at all, who are killing the nation slowly and irretrievably with their pretty words about religion and morality and the glory of their God, were parading on the televisions of America today for all the nation to see, talking about the finest sort of morality they know: the sort of morality which lets them decide--not science, not God, not the dispassionate wisdom of centuries of law--who should live and who should die. Grieve for the collapse of your great house, America, not for a woman who cannot see and cannot feel and cannot know the evil that tonight was done, in her name, against the principles of her beloved country. To subscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ and click 'Join This Group!' Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
