The News You Can Use Or You'll Lose (So Go Choose)

[hkellick]

Alot of interesting things happening around the world and I wanted to touch base on some of them.

Everyone's talking about Terri Schiavo. I've seen two people, so far, commenting about how terrible it is for the religious right and the republicans to be backing the parents, instituting a law that gives the parents a chance to save Terri's life... well, except that the judge wants nothing to do with it.
Let's move past the politics. The politics is, to me, a smoke screen for what's really going on.
Not that I have any idea what's really going on. I don't think anyone does.
It's difficult to get the real story here and that's truly worrisome. If you listen to Terri's husband, the facts are... Terri's a vegetable, incapable of knowing what's going on around her. If you listen to Terri's parents, she's.. half-baked? She's capable of knowing and understand what's going on around her, but not responding fully. And of course.. no one REALLY knows what's going on inside Terri's head but Terri and she can't tell anyone.
I question everyone's motives.. ESPECIALLY the husband.
So.. we have Mike. Mike has been suffering for 14 years, taking care of a wife who is severely brain damaged. Except.. he hasn't been. He hasn't taken care of his wife... she's received no treatment, per se, just a clean bed and a feeding tube... also Mike has been getting some on the side.. enough, apparently, to have given birth to two new children.
And then there's the manner of her "execution": dying by starving to death.
This is the part that twists in my stomach.. and why I agree (and god knows, I nearly never do) with the religious right.
Terri's husband, Mike, wants her to die by starvation. That means unless the judge changes his mind that the WORLD will watch Terri get weaker and weaker, less and less present.. for WEEKS.. until she dies.
I can't quite wrap my mind around how ANYONE.. how Mike, how the judge, how ANYONE could be OK with Terri Schiavo dying by Starvation. What an inhumane way to die. For god's sake Mike, you assumedly loved her once, can't you let her find a better way to die?
So, for the record, Mike wins the "Heartless Bastard of the Year" award. This guy goes into my personal hell. I know, Mike, that if I was your lady love, I'd take the kids and run. Because I'd hate to be your wife if I should have some sort of catastrophic accident.

Anyways.. my point is.. I agree with the right wingers this time around. What Mike wants to do is wrong. This is just wrong. I know that eventually that law might come around to bite someone else in a different position, but right here, right now, it was the right thing to do.
And, by and by, guys and gals, if you don't have a living will.. consider making one. Seriously. You never know WHEN something life threatning could happen to you. K and I talked about making living wills once we move in together. I plan to hold her to that.

Then there's Buffalo.
I wrote a post a couple weeks about the sad state of Erie County.
It's not getting better.
I check up on buffalonews.com as often as I can to see what the latest county scandal is.. and there's plenty.
The latest scandal.. and this one hits the bottom hard.. is about the county building in Buffalo running out of Toilet Paper because the vendors were paid late. Apparently things got so bad that, for a day or two, people brought in their own wipes.
Yes, i am serious. Here is a link to the story. or this editorial.
But never fear.. because the county figured out a way to keep it's golf courses open.
Good to see where our priorities are.
Then of course, there's the fact that Legislature Chairman George A. Holt Jr., a big champion of raising Erie County Sales Tax, couldn't bother to pay sales tax on his restaurant.
And that the County Comptroller has probably been mishandly loans, costing the county even more money.
All in all, many of these things are small and stupid. The restaurant owner, the mishandling of loans.. but right now.. well.. put yourself in the shoes of a typical citizen. Six months ago, the county proposed a 1% hike in sales tax (bringing it to 9.25% Sales Tax), it gets voted down and suddenly the county shuts down. The local paper has made a point of keeping tabs on every move Erie County makes.. 150 jobs lost at the Medical Center, closing of DMV offices, closing of county parks.. and then the scandals begin... County Executive Joel Giambra was paying some guy $80,000 a year to be his driver (this one's my favorite)... allegations of abuse while Joel Giambra screams "No, it's not that. It's that we suddenly have to put down a lot more money to pay for medical coverage of our citizens!"
Two new taxpayer advocacy groups have sprung up: Primary Challenge and Free Buffalo. Their ranks are bloated and there's still a whole bunch of people volunteering their time and efforts to help these groups clamp down on fiscal abuse.. and to kick the incumbents out of office.
I feel a certain sort of glee reading through this news. Buffalo and, more or less by extension, Erie County have been spiraling down the tubes for a while now. It reminds me of something Dr. Lockwood said.. She said Washington DC was a city of imports.. you weren't FROM DC.. you just lived there. Buffalo is a city of exports.. you're from Buffalo.. but you don't live there. There's no jobs, the city school district sucks and everyone in that city knows it.. and that's a huge shame because Buffalo is a NICE city. If a blizzard happened in DC and I got stuck in a snow bank, I seriously doubt anyone would help get me out.. but that HAS Happened in Buffalo because we have a small town mentality. In a lot of ways, Buffalo reminds me of a big college town... Buffalo has the Sabers, the Bills... and a whole lot of pride, but not much else.
I don't know if clamping down on fiscal irresponsibility will ever bring jobs back to Buffalo/Erie County.. or people back to Buffalo.. but it might help slow the decline. And that, for me, is a good thing.


OK. I'm done rambling for now.

Comments

[mythagon.livejournal.com]

One thought, and I don't know if it's true or not, but it is a possibility for what is going on:

before her accident, terri and husband discussed what they would want to happen to them in the event of vegetablization and she stated adamently that she would rather die than go on living.

Husband is trying to carry out her wishes and won't let the parents have custody b/c he _knows_ what she would have wanted. You can't give someone leathal injection in Florida, so the only way for her to die is to stop giving her food. I'm going to doubt that she's in pain, b/c that would be all over the conservative media (i.e. fox news) if it were true. Assuming she can even still feel pain, she's probably being given morphine or the equivalent. Given the options, this is the only way she can die.

Personally, if it was death by starvation or being a vegetable, i would rather die. I will not be kept alive by machines when my mind is that gone.

I agree that it is possible he is an ass, but I also think it is possible that he loves her very much and is doing everything he can to follow through on what he knows she would want.

Just a thought.

[lite.livejournal.com]

It's certainly possible that he's trying to be the good guy. Again, my information is limited and it's difficult to discern the truth among the various statements.

The problem, again, is the lack of a living will.

Personally, I'm trying to make sense of the whole thing and that's a very difficult thing to do given the amount of misinformation and my general mistrust in American mainstream media. I'm trying to determine what the motives might be.

On one hand, you have a husband who is saying "let her die". On the other hand, you have parents saying "No. We'll take care of her. Let us take care of her." The parents are saying the husband is refusing help for Terri (I actually believe this one. I suspect that, assuming Michael loved Terri, he gave up hope when various doctors told him what Janine said above.. that his wife's body is a mere shell and that his WIFE is gone. And if he doesn't love her/the allegations that he beat her are true (I honestly don't know. This one seems like it came out of left field.).. well.. that speaks for itself...)
On the other hand, you have her parents who have not given up hope and who may mistakenly believe (No idea, honestly, if it's a mistake or not.) that there may be a way for Terri to be Terri again and want that chance.

I'm trying to see past that, to the motives.. to the fact that everyone in this case is a faulty humans with their own motives. And it seems that Terri's parents motives seem pretty clear but Michael's less so.

Maybe, in Florida, the only way to let someone die is to, in this case, just take out her feeding tube. It's been pointed out (again, I have no idea) that injections are illegal and the web site peachtess points to says that taking out the feeding tube is, at least in law, synonymous to just ending life support.
If that's true.. if this is the most humane way Flordia has to let someone die, then Shame on Florida (shame on Florida anyways. I'm beginning to strongly dislike the State of Florida as a whole and it's not just because Jeb Bush is still governor.) and maybe that's what we, the public, should be conentrating on.. trying to get Florida to allow more humane ways to die instead of whether or not Terri lives.

As the facts lie now, though... I want to condemn the husband because the parents are begging him to let them take control and he is stubbornly refusing. Maybe you are right.. maybe Terri wouldn't want to live like this. I think it's the stubborness that makes it easy to villify him.

In the end, it's difficult to tell. I don't know if the motives I attribute to people are true. I have NO idea what Terri would want, but when you come down to it.. Michael is letting Terri die in a very inhumane way.
I'm not sure Terri would have wanted this either.

[phoenixsong]

OK, I've read at least the general timeline on the site peachtess posted. It certainly seems at least mostly unbiased, from a legal standpoint. (Not to mention, the timeline is easier to follow than the legal one on "Terri's Fight.")

Put it this way: if we were married, you were trying to let me go because there was little-to-no hope of my recovering, and my mother tried to fight it, would you say that was grounds for your guardianship of me to be terminated? No matter how well intentioned my parents were in the offer to take care of me, if you were POSITIVE I wouldn't want to live under those circumstances.

I'm asking mostly because peachtess' site's legal documentation (PDFs of the actual decisions) directly contradicts the parents' claim that the husband has never done anything in the way of care or rehabilitation.

*sigh* I still don't like the idea of a starvation death. But if my brain was half-rotted away, and I was only partially aware of my environment, I don't think I'd want to keep living like that, either. I risked the volume (which was actually pretty low) and watched the videos on the parents' site earlier today, and that's what I'm seeing. Not someone who has any cognizance "That's my mom, this is my family, I'm in a hospice/nursing home, I want XYZ." I see someone reacting at a pretty basic level, maybe even a trained level -- but not actively capable of want or complex recognition.

I feel for the parents, but I'm becoming more convinced they're grasping at straws in any hope for a meaningful recovery -- especially by bringing the Pope into it. (Yes, though not directly, just one of his writings on "This is what Catholics should believe.") peachtess's site shows they don't just want her to live, but actually expect a meaningful recovery. At this point, even if there was cognitive therapy that might have been helpful, it's many years too late if parts of her brain have dissolved.

In short, the media's done a terrible job of giving any real in-depth coverage to any of this. They're going for the emotional sensationalism (regardless of left-or-right bias), and I'm currently pretty disgusted it's gotten this much publicity with so little actual content. s:P~

[kiwiria.livejournal.com]

That's what my husband said too. I was appalled when he said, he didn't object to the husband's actions, but with this reasoning, it makes sense. I really, really, REALLY hope you're right!

[mythagon.livejournal.com]

I really hope those are his motives as well. Very few people probably truely know what's really going on, and the media cares only for what will sell best, not the truth. If he's fighting tooth and nail for what he _knows_ his wife would have wanted, I salute him. If he just wants her to die because he's tired of dealing with it all, I'll take off his man-bits myself.

In the end, I only know that I wouldn't want to live that way. And that I would never want the government involved.