Apologies: a Terri Schaivo post

Check out the background information on these people. Her adoring parents. You remember - the ones who agreed to sell the list (Schindler's list) of donors, the father having already pulled the plug on his own mother in the past. Great people, those Schindlers.

[In] 1990, [Terri Schaivo] suffered cardiac arrest - the consequence of a marked lack of potassium in her body, brought on by the bulimia - and her brain, starved of oxygen, suffered irreversible damage.

For the next two years, Schiavo received first 'aggressive' and then 'experimental' therapy. Medical attempts to rehabilitate her continued until 1994, in vain. In 1996, CAT scans showed that much of her cerebral cortex had withered away and been replaced by leaking spinal fluid. She was in what court doctors diagnosed as 'a persistent vegetative state'.

In the meantime, however, the serpent of greed had entered the grievous garden of the Schiavos' and Schindlers' loss. In 1993, Terri's husband Michael won a malpractice suit against a doctor who had failed to diagnose his wife's bulimia and was awarded more than $1 million: $750,000 for his wife and $300,000 for himself - for a 'loss of consortium'.

Terri's parents demanded he split the latter with them; they too, they argued, had suffered a loss, if not of 'consortium', then of their daughter's company. When Schiavo refused to cough up, the Schindlers instituted proceedings in a vain attempt to have custody of Terri transferred from her husband to them.

In 1998, Michael Schiavo, citing the testimony of five witnesses (including himself and Terri's mother) that Terri had repeatedly said she would never want to be kept alive in a vegetative state, went to court to have his wife's feeding tube removed. The Schindlers opposed him.

Ruling in the husband's favour, the judge concluded the acrimony 'was predicated on.the fact that Mr Schiavo was unwilling to equally divide his [$300,000] award with Mr and Mrs Schindler'.
  Jamaica Observer article

Apparently, these greedy s.o.b.s (the Schwindlers) had been claiming their daughter, whose brain had atrophied and head was filling with spinal fluid, actually communicated with them when no one else was in ear-shot. (Even so far as to saying she told them "I want to live" just before the court ordered her feeding tube pulled.) Michael Schaivo, the husband, has gone into hiding because of death threats (which also have the judges under police protection) from those Christian "right-to-life" fanatics who insist God wanted a brain-dead woman's body kept "alive" (and punishment for not doing so should be the death that was waiting for her when men butted out of God's business), egged on by Tom DeLay and Butthead Bush (read the article if you need explanation).

Do you think there was ever any chance that all these bloodsuckers might use the fame of this poor woman's plight to draw attention to the damage and death by bulimia of thousands of young women caught up in this country's culture of thinness ?

This column has said it before; I will say it again. It's time for thinking men and women, the world over - but especially in the US - to read and reread, very seriously, one or more of the many detailed accounts of the campaign of lies, the brutalisation of the national sensibility, the elections' rigging, the incitement to hysteria, the intimidation, vengefulness, incarceration, death threats, and eventually, the targeted murders via which, between 1925 and 1935, the National Socialists in Germany first gained and then consolidated their power; destroyed German democracy; and part-terrorised and part-corrupted the citizenry of a civilised nation into quiescence or, worse, into becoming the animals (cf Guantanamo, Abu Graib, Bagram, etc) which the Third Reich would soon unleash upon the world.

And by the way...I'm sure you've heard. The Pope isn't being kept alive with a feeding tube.