Good Goc—tet the Lady Die Already

After years of legal wrangling, weeks of moral ping-pong,
and. 13 days without her feeding tube, Terri Schiavo
passed away peacefully in the arms of her husband
Michael last Thursday. Her parents were not by her side.

 

In a vegetative state for the last 20 years, it was
Schiavo’s wish to die with dignity, according to her hus-
band. She did not have a living will, however, which made
the dispute open to the opinions of everyone capable of
forming them.

Terri’s brother, Bobby Schindler, who has spent more
time on Larry King Live than in the Florida hospice with
his sister, was with her until daybreak when the staff
asked him to leave so that Michael could be by her side.
Schindler was outraged, and Michael was forced to ask
him to leave.

“Mr. Schiavo’s overriding concern was that Mrs.
Schiavo had a right to die in dignity and die in peace,”
Michael Schiavo’s lawyer, George Felos, said. “She had a
right for her last moments on this earth to be in a spirit
of loye and not of acrimony.”

The acrimony, as Felos puts it mildly, reached all the
way to President George W. Bush, who uncharacteristical-
ly flew back from his vacation to sign an eleventh-hour
bill that Congress passed to keep the feeding tube in. The
bill attempted to override countless court decisions in
Michael’s favour.

While the battle lines were drawn on a moralistic
front—every pro-lifer and preacher in the US fought to
keep Terri alive—the unfolding events ultimately showed
the lengths to which the right wing are willing to push
their agenda. Nearly every constitutional safeguard that
separates state powers from the judiciary was steamrolled
in an attempt to save a woman who apparently didn’t
want saving. Ultimately, the courts held true.

On a very general level, I believe in a person’s right to
die with dignity, and I say so based on my very personal
past. However, this firestorm erupted out of a private
matter and was perverted into public fodder. That’s the
true crime against humanity: state interference in person-
al matters.

It’s a good thing Terri, may she rest in peace, was
unaware of the whole thing.

6 | www.theotherpress.ca

News Wears Short Shorts

Brandon Ferguson, News Editor

God's Homey Dies

In ongoing efforts to
exploit those clinging
to life with feeding ~
tubes, Pope John Paul
II had medical setback
after medical setback,
before succumbing to
death in Vatican City.

After last month’s
ailments, and his recent
mumblings from his
apartment window over
the Easter holiday, the
pope took a turn for
the worse. He suffered
cardiovascular collapse
and went into septic shock after a
urfinary-tract infection spread. This
comes on top of the feeding tube
that was inserted two weeks ago to
aide in his recovery from a tra-
cheotomy to alleviate breathing
problems.

Shortly before his death, Vatican
officials described the 84-year-old
pontiff as “lucid, fully conscious,
and extraordinarily serene.”
Although he was given the sacra-

   

ments of the sick and dying, he later
talked (or mumbled) with cardinals
and bishops, and had passages of
the Bible read to him. Again: one
tough S.O.B.

One of the leading candidates to
take over from the pope is Nigerian
Cardinal, Francis Arinze, the 72-
yeat-old Prefect of Divine Worship
and the Discipline of the
Sacraments. If Arinze is chosen, he
would become the first African pon-
tiff since Gelasius I in 496 AD. No

word on what the new pope
would be named, but Vegas
has Pope Davis Love IIT run-
ning at 5:2 odds.

In all seriousness, there
may be no man more recog-
nized in the world than John
Paul II was. He was the Coca
Cola of divinity, the Michael
Jordan of benevolent beings.
In his 102 trips abroad, mil-
lions upon millions of people
came out to see the pope and
hear his inspirational words.
No pope in the history of
| popedom ever used words as
weapons more poignantly
than JP II. “Social justice can-
not be attained by violence.
Violence kills what it intends to cre-
ate,’ he once told a crowd of
thousands. “The truth is not always
the same as the majority decision,”
he once remarked. “Stupidity is also
a gift of God, but one mustn’t mis-
use it,” he warned.

Though his 26-year reign as the
human closest to God has ended,
Pope John Paul IT has left an indeli-
ble mark on all of humanity.

 

 

Indonesia s Done Something
to Piss God Off

Indonesia has been rocked by
another massive earthquake, this
one measuring 8.7 on the Richter
scale. There are estimates of up to
2,000 people dead, though the UN
has only confirmed 620 dead so far.
Whew. Otherwise that might have
really sucked. Isn’t the news such a
cheery endeavour? Buy yourself a
beer today, give an extra large tip to
the server, and save a few quarters
for a homeless person. At the very
least.

Hardest hit was the island of
Nias, where 200,000 are without
food or shelter. Government offi-
cials admitted late last week that
humanitarian efforts had been slow
to that point. “Bad damage to roads
and bridges and bad weather ate dis-
turbing distribution of aid and the
relief effort,’ President Susilo
Bambang Yudhoyono conceded
while visiting Nias.

Aftershocks and small miracles
continued three days after the
March 28 quake. Residents feared

 

the collapse of their homes in the
wake of tremors, some as high as
6.3, while people were still being
pulled from the rubble. A group of
11 surfers was found by a search
helicopter off the coast of a
favourite reef.

The quake has been a “setback”
for Canadian relief agency CARE,
already in Indonesia since the
December 26 tsunami that claimed
126,000 Indonesian lives. Aly-Khan
Rajani, program manager for
CARE’s southeast bureau, said,
“people are really scared. They
thought it was another tsunami.”

Irony, being the cruelest of plot
twists, can be held partially respon-

sible for the collapse of the World
Vision building on the island of
Nias.

Although efforts
somewhat easier by virtue of being
there already, the bad weather has

are made

utterly retarded humanitarian
efforts. Entire villages have been
wiped out, leaving hungry and
angry survivors out in the cold.
Chaos erupts when supplies are
handed out. It’s a terribly sad situa-
tion, and as of yet, no international
bidding wars have begun like last
time to raise billions of dollars. Old
news is old news, I guess. And yet
John Travolta still lands movie roles.
Hmmm....

April 6/2005