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20.3.06

The human spirit: the lessons of the Terri Schiavo story, one year on 

Randy Thomas’s blog reminds me that it’s been a year since had her removed. The faded out like so many in the , after building up to a crescendo, and we are no more or developed as a one year on. The issue is still as divided now as it was before.
   My good friend and photographer Doug Rimington worked in a when he was younger and saw the pain people were in. Room after room of human pain and sorrow. And he fell in to the camp that was opposite to mine. Having seen my own mother pass away in 1994 to cancer, I know the experience caused her pain, but we were all brought together even more as a family. The became stronger for us. Therefore, I sided with those who believed Terri to be “alive”, finding that the nurses who swore that she was cognizant of her surroundings were unjustly silenced by the .
   I respect both sides of the argument. I don’t think any less of Doug because he disagreed with me. He was a bit surprised to find that there were nurses who were silenced, and, to be frank, so was I—though I admit I found those statements on a site connected to Terri’s parents, who wanted her feeding tube to remain in. Therefore, there was bound to be some .
   So, in 2006, where are we? We seem to get behind the latest causes as told to us by the , and when the story has passed, we don’t seem to care much. Was Terri aware of her surroundings? If not, were those nurses lying under oath? And how come the mainstream media hardly featured those nurses’ statements?
   Perhaps by contrast, interviewed a Kiwi who found herself in a state and recovered, and she claimed she was fully aware of what was going on while she could not speak.
   I believe we don’t look enough into and how, when our bodies fail, we are still capable of having awareness. There, too, one finds who believe abilities are confidence tricks. Instead, as a human race, we overestimate the and the of certain —witness how we treat movie stars by raising them on to a pedestal. And with stories like Terri’s, we underestimate the ability of the —even though every day we make decisions based on and those undefinable aspects of our lives.
   Our priorities are all mixed up. Whether we agree with Terri’s tube being removed or not, I say we champion the human spirit and will, before we champion ego and .
   To do this, more of us need to value human life before we pick up another or weekly talking about Tom and Katie, Brad and Angelina, or some other celebrity.
   Otherwise, nothing will change.

Del.icio.us tags: media | Terri Schiavo | celebrity | mainstream media | MSM | human spirit | life | tabloid
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PS.: Referenced also at Randy’s site, a pro-Terri blog collective can be found via www.blogsforterri.com.  
Thank you for highlighting this issue Jack.  
You’re welcome, Randy. I’m glad you reminded me, and I remember how strongly I felt at the time about it. And I wondered: why don’t I feel as strong now? The answer was disturbing: because I got caught up in the media circus, sucked in to the hype. A year on, I can take stock of that and look at what we can really do, so that Terri did not die in vain.  
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Entries from 2006 to the end of 2009 were done on the Blogger service. As of January 1, 2010, this blog has shifted to a Wordpress installation, with the latest posts here.
   With Blogger ceasing to support FTP publishing on May 1, I have decided to turn these older pages in to an archive, so you will no longer be able to enter comments. However, you can comment on entries posted after January 1, 2010.


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