Posted on 03/14/2006 11:28:51 AM PST by 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.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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
I call the Easter vote for Terri in D.C., the Schiavo Fakeout. Visit my tag line to see the picture of the president returning to DC on Air Force 1. Some handler thought Terri supporters would fall for it. Nope.
Laura Bush was on a plane to Afghanistan to celebrate freedom with Afghan women on the very day Terri succumbed to torture sponsored by the State of Florida.
Greer's best friends, the Semblers were at the Inauguration Balls for the bushies. They have always given the Republican Party oodles of money.
Sembler the son is in charge of Charlie Crist's campaign for governor. Crist is both stupid and aloof.
That said, I am able to separate that issue from others that I do agree with Bush on, such as the war on terror and taxes. I am terribly unhappy with the border and with spending, and the Schiavo issue added to the discontent. It brought Bush down a great deal in stature, from someone who had a chance to approach Reagan's qualities, down to someone only slightly better than his dad had been. Still a helluva lot better than having a President Kerry, but not near as good as he could have been.
Roberts and Alito proved that it was important to re-elect Bush. Schiavo proved that we don't have a conservative majority even with a GOP one. Keep working for that conservative cause, and don't lose faith in what good people can accomplish.
Kerry's the Bushes' cousin and they are all related to Count Dracula. Now that's funny.
I congratulate you on a post remarkably lacking in substance
I don't mean to be harsh, but that's just delusional.
There is a lot of class being displayed on this thread.
I know some folks like to paint the "insurgency" as a bunch of outside terrorists who are imposing on the fine Iraqi people. It makes a better picture. But that is only a slice of the insurgency. And the 1000 folks that were killed a couple of weeks ago weren't killed by foreigners.NOTE: It looks like lugsoul bought the lie that the mosque bombing spawned over 1000 deaths, and wanted us to leave Iraq because of it. Coward.
Nope. But when you have to resort to crap like the "75% of the country is peaceful" mem, knowing full well that the statistic refers to the 75% of the country where there aren't very many people, that tells me that you don't even believe what you are saying. NOTE: So now we know lugsoul is a follower of John Murtha.
Sure. It is going very, very, very well. NOTE: More Murtha/Kerry type sarcasm.
Not trying to pick at you, but the whole "we won the war in three weeks" meme really ignores what has gone on since that time, as well as the sacrifice of our troops since that time. It is more like "we won the war we thought we were going to have in three weeks, but the war we didn't expect is ongoing." NOTE: lugsoul sure likes the term "meme", as well as John Kerry's cut and run politics.
If you must wallow in schadenfreude, you should try to be at least a little up front about it. lugsoul's kindergarten report card: Does not play well with others.
I've seen a lot of folks around FR touting Pence as a great "conservative."
Expanding the Federal government's powers to regulate sex scenes in books is in no way, shape or form politically "conservative."
Put this with his bogus legislative 'priorities' and it leads me to believe that Pence would rather be a mullah than a President.
Yeah, Pence is not a conservative, but lugsoul is.
Baghdad has fallen? This was posted March 9. lugsoul apparently thinks that we didn't take Iraq in a few weeks. More Nancy Pelosi style discourse.
ABOUT BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN:[referring to the sex scenes (ewwwww)Not graphic, and very brief.
It is worth seeing. Ledger, who I never really liked in anything except "Monster's Ball," gives a performance for the ages. Where's the barf alert?
These are the types of things that I referred to when I spoke of how Mr./Ms. lugsoul might be more at home at DU. Or some forum that caters to grumpy libertine libertarians who are anti-US, anti-military and who have a bit of pacifism.
She did? Last I heard, she wasn't alive. If you shook her side gently from side to side, you could hear the sloshing of the fluid. Correct?
Thank you for this remembrance, and for the thoughtful call to reanimate a culture of life in the name of Terri Schiavo.
The moonbats adopted it, and Michael seized on it for his own alibi. But I gather it was invented by a lawyer for purposes of bringing the malpractice suit. (I think this is from Diana Lynne's book, but at the moment I don't have the book at hand to reference.) When Michael's legal team could not find any malpractice, one lawyer [who was mentioned by name] suggested suing for failure to treat [nonexistent] bulimia. The doctors' lawyers went along with it because it tended to implicate Terri in her own collapse and thus both exonerate the doctors and greatly reduce the settlement.
Later, the Medical Examiner, in his autopsy report, all but mocked the bulimia theory, albeit in polite medical language. He shot it full of holes. There you have retroactive proof, if any were needed, that the lawsuit was fraud.
But then, we didn't need an autopsy to make the point. We said it loud and clear in Free Republic long before Terri was put to death. The case that Terri's injury was not due to bulimia was overwhelming -- and it was proven correct.
The mystery remains: what caused her collapse? The one innocent explanation (bulimia) is gone. The one possible suspect has told several different stories about what happened that night. Either one of his stories is true and the rest are lies, or none is true and they all are lies.
So where's Columbo?
I can't follow. What in post #40 are you referring to? She did what?
God bless Kevin Fobbs!
Terri after the attack and before bioethicking.
8mm
"In fact, when medical examiner Jon Thogmartin undertook the collection of Terri's medical records to launch his autopsy, he reported that he tracked her initial Humana Hospital-Northside admission records to Fox's office. According to Thogmartin, attorneys on both sides of the malpractice case conceded to the bulimia theory because there was nothing else 'to hang their hats on.'"
So: A consulting lawyer for Michael Schiavo had physical control of the medical records and made up the theory. Bad enough Fox was phishing the med records to contrive a malpractice case. But what was never revealed to the court or to the malpractice jury was the bone scan. I wonder if Fox had that document too? If he did, and suppressed it, the malpractice suit had to be premeditated flim-flam. Evidence that Terri was the victim of trauma would have gotten the suit thrown out of court on the spot.
I will hope and assume there is an innocent explanation for Mr. Fox's course of action; but it eludes me. For that matter, one looks in vain for evidence of integrity in any of Michael Schiavo's lawyers.
The same Gary Fox said this on Greta Van Sustenance's show last year:
GARY FOX, 1992 ATTORNEY FOR SCHIAVOS: "What happened, Greta, as best we know, is that Terri had a condition known as bulimia (search). It's an eating disorder. She'd had it for many years. She grew up as a chubby, overweight child, and over time, she coped with that condition by developing this eating disorder, bulimia."
***"One night, Michael and Terri had had dinner. And she had had a large meal, and not long after the meal, he heard a thumping sound in the couple's bathroom, went to investigate, found Terri lying on the floor of the bathroom. She had just purged, apparently, or vomited, binged, which is what bulimics do and had a heart attack. And by the time that fire rescue arrived at the Schiavo home, why, she had suffered severe brain damage."
http://journals.aol.com/justice1949/JUSTICEFORTERRISCHIAVO/entries/942
Can you believe the guy had the nerve to say this? It could be shown to be patently false. His timeline is nothing like that of any testimony provided by either Michael, Terri's brother, Bobby, or her friend, Jackie.
Remarkable! My hat is off to Gary Fox. I don't believe I've ever seen so many lies in two short paragraphs.
Great advice. And it is getting easier to do since it appears their numbers are dropping....:)
God Bless everyone on this thread who stands up for life. The life God created.
If we don't deny an animal a drink of water, how do you arrive that it is possible that Terri should be denied a drink of water? Other than that, I liked your response.
If we don't deny an animal a drink of water, how do you arrive that it is possible that Terri should be denied a drink of water? Other than that, I liked your response.
There are facially-valid arguments that such action was legally right and proper. Many of them involve accepting some rather dubious claims as fact, and regarding certain legal theories as compelling over certain others which would seem they should take precedence.
Basically, I would regard that first issue as: if one were to view in the best possible light everything favorable to Michael, Felos, et al., and view in the worst possible light everything favorable to the Schindlers, would it be possible to conclude that Michael's actions were proper.
My interpretation is that if one really stretched the boundaries of "best possible light" and "worst possible light", one might conceivably be able to justify them. It would require stretching credulity to the breaking point, but it might be possible under such terms.
That having been said, my bigger point is that I see no satisfactory justification for the way the Bushes handled this, regardless of whether Michael's behavior was proper or not. It may be that Bush was told that Greer's cops would resist with bloodshed if need be to prevent Terri's rescue. Even if that's the case, I would suggest that bloodshed sufficient to uphold the law would be preferable to allowing open sedition.
Something good is happening in Minnesota, North Country Gazette reports.
MINNESOTA—As the first anniversary of the death of Terri Schiavo nears, the disabled Floridian whose feeding tube was removed by court order, Minnesota legislators debated a proposed new law that would require hospitals to give food and water to dying patients.
Snip
Hospice Minnesota opposes the bill.
Minnesota Bill Would Require Food, Water For Dying Patients
8mm
Nat Hentoff of the Village Voice, dean of the Left's civil libertarians, angrily called it "the longest public execution in American history." It was the saddest, too.
Lest we forget: "Judicial Murder" by Nat Hentoff, March 29, 2005
Terri's judicial murder was an evil milestone. It was a day of shame. America's decency and honor were stained by evil. Until the stain is overcome and we are made clean, we will never again be the City on the Hill. A country that will no longer care for the children, the weak, the aged, the ill has become a barbarian rabble.
The White Rose is a perfect symbol for Terri. We say this to the evidoers who tormented Terri and brought shame upon America: We will not shut up, we are your bad conscience; The White Rose will not leave you in peace.
I can't think of even one. That part was outside the law, which permits the removal of a medical device but not denial of mouth feeding. That was simply an arbitrary act of evil by George Greer. He had no authority to do it.
It was an act of malevolence.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.