Terri's Day challenges the nation to unify

Renew America ^ | March 13, 2006 | Kevin Fobbs

[KevinNuPac]

Terri's Day challenges the nation to unify

Kevin Fobbs

March 13, 2006

Terri's Day — A Celebration of the Culture of Life honoring Terri Schiavo with a day of remembrance challenges each and every one of us to stop for a moment and ask ourselves a question, do we respect ourselves, our families, our lives?

And if we are faced with the question of the possible certainty of death, does anyone truly know, or even have the faintest clue about, our wishes? That is the greatest good, the greatest legacy that Terri Schiavo's death and an annual "Terri's Day" can bring to our lives and to the celebration of the Culture of Life.

On March 18th, we as a nation will begin to grieve again, to reach into our hearts and feel with our collective national spirit what the Schindler family felt last year at this time as each moment since Terri was disconnected from the feeding lifeline, the moments crept by like hours and hours like days.

All of us have felt in some way that pain — even if it were only in the privacy of our loved one's home, hospital room, hospice or perhaps talking with an attorney and doctor attempting to make sense out of some fleeting comments made in a conversation perhaps voiced ten, twelve or even two decades earlier — not necessarily an expression of her true feeling about an end-of-life decision but merely an incidental musing in a long-forgotten side conversation.

For at least one million Americans, and quite possibly a whole lot more, this is an opportunity to voice an opinion through a pledge supporting a resolution in each state called "Terri's Day — A Celebration of the Culture of Life." Each and every person who cares that your family, your spouse, your mother, your father, your sister or brother understands with clarity what you wish the end of life for you to be, with dignity and certainty should sign the online pledge at www.kevinfobbs.com and take the additional step to sign a Living Will — or as they call it at www.terrisfight.org, the Will to Live.

Some have asked why Americans should care about an annual Terri's Day. It is quite simple, we tend to keep turning the page on the Culture of Life because we feel it does not affect us. We tend to believe that seemingly universal belief that those who are handicapped, those who are not quite living a "perfect" life or by contemporary notion "ideal" then those lives are possibly disposable, marginal, not relevant, and part of the Culture of Death which embraces a "disposable society."

But life and our values for the Culture of Life are not disposable. Think about the young people today who would rather hurt themselves or even take their own lives rather than feel "imperfect" or the elderly person whose family is told by an insensitive health care professional while the stricken person struggles to cling to life, "she would be better off in another place," — just let her die, disconnect her from life, because her quality of life is not up to "contemporary standards. "

Why does celebrating the Culture of Life in Michigan become so essential for all of us in America? It is important for several reasons. Dr. Jack Kervorkian, also known as "Doctor Death" helped launch first in Michigan and then the nation the notion of the death culture. Secondly, and equally as important, at the May 12 event — just two days before Mother's Day — there will also be a "Mary's Moms" celebration of those women and mothers who have met challenges in standing up for some aspect of the Culture of Life.

This past weekend I sat at my cousin's funeral — or going home celebration, which more accurately describes it — thinking about the dearly departed and how she packed so much caring for others into her life even as she struggled with illness and advancing age. She was a wonderful woman who had lived through many, many challenges in her life, but in her 73 years she had met these challenges with dignity and had conveyed to her family when would be the right time to allow her to pass away.

Her daughter, who is a minister, spoke to the packed church about the times when, with all of her pain and then a stroke, the doctors had informed them that perhaps it was better to let her go. Yet that was three years ago that that occurred, and if the family had listened to the doctors and refused to see how she fought back and not only recovered but went back to volunteering at the church to feed and clothe the homeless. The medical professionals didn't care about an elderly lady who was on dialysis, but the family did and they knew better. Patricia lived three more years — years her extensive extended family considered "a gift from God."

So isn't part of the lesson of Terri's legacy and Terri's Day for families and loved ones to have a meaningful conversation with their family and to have the written document on hand as well that conveys the wishes clearly and concisely? You betcha.

As I sat in the church I thought of all of the families across the nation and the world who were sitting at their loved one's bedsides — or even standing outside of a hospital emergency room — overwhelmed with emotion, torn by what may be days of conflicting anguished decisions. I thought again of how out of death we may have the certainty of life. Terri's death reminded the nation that yes a state can and will starve you to death, and your family may be rendered helpless as you watch your loved one's precious life forces drain slowly away.

By signing the online pledge at www.kevinfobbs.com or going to www.terrisfight.org, you can learn about how to encourage your state legislature to establish March 31st as an official Terri's Day. Hold a Culture of Life Home Party or meet-and-greet to sign pledges, share ideas and support The Terri Schindler Schiavo Foundation as well as Culture of Life activities and events in your community or around the nation. Between now and March 31st you can make a dramatic difference for yourself, your family and for the nation. Stand up for the Culture of Life because one person, one life, one family can and does make a difference in America. Make the difference and be the difference today. America...The countdown for the Culture of Life has begun.

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Kevin Fobbs is President of National Urban Policy Action Council (NuPac), a non-partisan civic and citizen-action organization that focuses on taking the politics out of policy to secure urban America's future one neighborhood, one city, and one person at a time. View NuPac on the web at www.nupac.info. Kevin Fobbs is a regular contributing columnist for the Detroit News. He is also the daily host of The Kevin Fobbs Show on News Talk WDTK - 1400 AM in Detroit. Listen to The Kevin Fobbs Show online at www.wdtkam.com daily 2-3 p.m., and call in toll-free nationwide to make your opinion count at 800-923-WDTK(9385) © Copyright 2006 by Kevin Fobbs http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/fobbs/060313

[floriduh voter]

Your 2008. Pinellas County is the real capital of the United States because of all the big donors here to the GOP party. There's serious money here.

All power was ceded to swamp judge greer due to serious money. All were invited to see Terri but nobody would see Terri when she was doing well but Michael Schiavo REALLY wanted Jeb to see Terri after she'd already been tortured for about a week. Nobody looks good with no food or water for a week.

Last Easter there wasn't a whole lot of eating going on. It was a hot day at Hospice Woodside, a blazing sun and nobody had an appetite. Easter was the day that Not Dead Yet did their demonstration.

What really BUGS ME is that there were people headed to Hospice Woodside and when they heard on the radio Jeb saying that he was going in to save Terri, these Terri supporters turned around because they thought Terri was safe.

The NEXT DAY, Jeb said "there's nothing I can do." Disgusting.

[floriduh voter]

I threw Barbara Bush's book away. I believe she was part of the decision to follow through w/the starvation/dehydration of Terri.

[floriduh voter]

I think that was a thread by FR_addict. Check my user posts. I can't remember the name of that thread.

[8mmMauser]

Shows communists supporting Michael. That is a common strain amongst his supporters, I think. The unsavory of the world supported him, few as they were,including paid demonstrators, and the decent people supported Terri. It was as simple as it was obvious, no middle ground. Only the MSM made it look complicated.

[8mmMauser]

June Maxim of North Country Gazette speaks out.

“Ensuring Care For Each Incapacitated Person” is the headline on an opinion piece by Sen. Burt L. Saunders (R-Naples), recently published in Florida’s Bradenton Herald.

Senator Burt L. Saunders “Recent news articles on guardianship imply that Florida statutes governing guardianship are lacking and need revision. I wish to address this issue because I believe Florida is on the cutting edge of guardianship issues and is leading the nation in protecting our most vulnerable citizens”, Saunders says.

Hardly....

ANALYSIS - Guardianship Issues Dictate Unsealing Of Schiavo Finances

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(this includes Ohioan from Florida's ping list, update to 4/8.)



Terri on the road to recovery before the second stage began.

[8mmMauser]

By Karen Ward, RN...

Euthanasia and assisted suicide is not some new phenomenon just reaching America’s shores, but has been decades in slowly, incrementally creeping into our society, into the medical field and medical industry, into the legal field, into government, and even into the clergy. Euthanasia and assisted suicide had been practiced in parts of Europe for years, before it was finally legalized into public policy. Similarly, euthanasia and the specific types of assisted suicide have evolved and are practiced within the United States, under terminology such as futile care, terminal sedation, and hastening death, whether people know about it, acknowledge it, or deny or accept it.

Myra Christopher, Euthanasia and the Healthcare Connection - PART 1

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[8mmMauser]

More on the relenting governor and on the seven books stirring the topic again.

The Terri Schiavo case may live on in America's bookstores, with no fewer than seven tomes on the subject currently in print. But the battle in Florida has come to a halt.

The governor relents -- finally!

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[8mmMauser]

Liza Fabrizio writes on the dems and their tactics...

Press calls him mean, ruthless, abusive, divisive and, oh yes, a hypocrite because, "He attacked ‘activist judges’ while trying to force federal judges to take over the Terri Schiavo case." Will liberals never understand that activist judges are those who make law rather than adjudicate it. In the Schiavo case, those who are tasked with making law did just that, only to be rebuffed by precisely this sort of judiciary.

Culture of corruption

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[8mmMauser]

Not to forget, the Topix.net forums with topics from all around, including our own Freerepublic...

Terri Schiavo News

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[8mmMauser]

Ping.

Thanks to Coleus for this wagglebee thread...

Suicide-clinic entrepreneur: Depressed? 'We never say no'

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[T'wit]

>> ...under terminology such as futile care, terminal sedation, and hastening death...

We have simple, honest words to describe things. When you hear prettied-up phrases like these, the alarms should go off. Such terms are always meant to deceive. They call something "terminal sedation" but they mean, "I'm going to kill your grandmother."

G.K. Chesterton, in his essay On Evil Euphemisms, picked up on a budding death culture (and other moonbat reformers) nearly a century ago. (It is astonishing how much the liberal cranks of his era sound like the ones we have to suffer.)

Chesterton wrote, with his usual cheerful sarcasm,

"As for the social justification of murder, that has already begun; and earnest thinkers had better begin at once to think about a nice inoffensive name for it. The case for murder, on modern relative and evolutionary ethics, is quite overwhelming. There is hardly one of us who does not, in looking round his or her social circle, recognize some chatty person or energetic social character whose disappearance, without undue fuss or farewell, would be a bright event for us all. ... [This must be achieved by] the introduction of that new form of liberty which we may agree to call, perhaps, the practice of Social Subtraction... [or] Life-Control or Free Death... xxx

[T'wit]

>> I believe Florida is on the cutting edge of guardianship issues and is leading the nation in protecting our most vulnerable citizens”, Saunders says.

Go back to your mother ship, alien fool.

[8mmMauser]

It has been my thesis for some time, bolstered by friend of old, Ray Sleeper and his lexicon of Soviet words. To understand how the left does it, we must conquer our own limitations self-imposed, that words mean what the dictionary says. The lefties burst out of such bounds by recognizing words as tools, not for meaning, but for the effect they may spur. It is effective for them as a tool of their own projections, hence thrusting their own faults out onto their opposites. We see it often with the lefties who try to disrupt our threads. They call people they hate haters and they mask their own lies by calling their adversaries liars.

It is a matter of either guiding their useful idiots to prattle emotion-charged words like bigot or racist, or in redefining the words comfortable to those same idiots. Euphemisms serve the latter.

Peace to us may mean something akin to everyone getting along and eschewing conflict, but as they may instruct allies, peace can mean elimination of opposition, or the peace of a cemetary.

Euphemisms fit in as well, as means of softening harsh intentions.

Our own definations thus become relegated to incidental or almost coincidental so far as the left goes. Hence they continue to win arguments against the innocent and well meaning who lack that devious element in their thinking.

A recipe for execution becomes a palatable Exit Protocol.

</rambling rant>

[TheSpottedOwl]

Excellent, comprehensive article. So do you think the records will be audited by an independent firm?

[T'wit]

Language has been my little battleground too, over the years. Things grow worse and worse. The leftist press, misnamed MSM, abandoned journalism thirty, forty years ago in favor of political sermonizing. It has reached the point of 24/7 rhetoric interrupted by a monthly factoid or two.

Chesterton is an antidote. So is this next [the ref is NOT ADVERTISING, but merely ONE source for the reissued edition that is currently available...] IDEAS HAVE CONSEQUENCES, by Richard Weaver, one of the seminal works of the modern conservative movement. If nothing else, it would be extraordinarily valuable just for reminding us that ideas are the casus belli, not our fellow humans who are, one and all, children of God. But every page has new treasures of insight and wisdom. I would especially point all to chapter 8, The Power of the Word

Finally, I would recommend THE LOST TOOLS OF LEARNING, by Dorothy Sayers. The whole essay is available right here.

Sayers's diagnosis, from 1947, is the same as our own today: "For we let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects. We who were scandalized in 1940 when men were sent to fight armored tanks with rifles, are not scandalized when young men and women are sent into the world to fight massed propaganda with a smattering of "subjects"; and when whole classes and whole nations become hypnotized by the arts of the spell binder, we have the impudence to be astonished."

[wagglebee]

I think what I find most "depressing" is the idea that someday some eugenicist will be allowed to decide that there is no longer a reason to continue to allow me to eat. And I do not say this likely, I truly feel that society is approaching a point where people of a certain age or medical condition will just be left to die.

[8mmMauser]

What has unnerved me a lot about the atrocity against Terri was that I, myself, got gradually innoculated to paying little attention to the growth of euthanasia. Now I look back in amazement at what may have happened to friends and family already. At least some of its stealth is unmasked in the wake up call over Terri.

We are seeing the cases more and more as we peel back the masks.

[bjs1779]

What really BUGS ME is that there were people headed to Hospice Woodside and when they heard on the radio Jeb saying that he was going in to save Terri, these Terri supporters turned around because they thought Terri was safe.

I ran across a video of that the other day, but can't find it right now. Probably isn't important anyway.

[KingofZion]

Agreed. National cabbage day it is.

[bjs1779]

Agreed. National cabbage day it is.

Sure, but who is the cabbage, you people or Terri? Make yourself clear if possible.