The Schiavo Lesson

Unless you've been in hiding for the last few weeks, you must know something about the Terri Shiavo situation. As I've watched this unfold, sad in so many respects, I see a huge lesson to learn from this. If Terri had made a living will stating how she felt, this whole thing would never have become such a public news story. If she had written down somewhere what she wanted to happen to her, this would not have been so complicated.

I'm here now to state my own feelings. I do NOT want to be Terri Shiavo. I do NOT want to be kept alive for years in a comatose state. I do NOT want to be on life support. I do NOT want a feeding tube keeping me in this world.

I'm not afraid to die. When the time comes to exit this existence, I do not want to prolong an essentially worthless life. And I most certainly don't want some situation where people are arguing over whether I should stay or go.

I believe in God and I believe in an existence beyond our present reality. I certainly don't know what lies beyond death, but there is no sense in obscenely prolonging passing into that next phase. Doing so is really nothing but fear of the unknown. Or fear that one's beliefs are wrong.

I can't even fathom the thinking of those who would want to stretch their life out in a comatose state. Particularily those who profess to be religious and have gathered outside Terri Schiavo's nursing home protesting in indignation. Those same people who never met Terri, who can't for a second know what it must be like being in Terri's body. Are these religious types that have assembled just afraid for their own selves, using Ms. Shiavo as their alter ego?

And what angers me about those religious hipocrites and their so-called "culture of life" is why they are not protesting every death sentence about to be completed. Unless they are so out of touch with news in America (apparently not so out of touch that they knew of Terri Schiavo) they must surely know that a certain percentage of those who have been put to death were innocent of the crime. But even if they were guilty, these religious one-sided thinkers won't give them a chance to become reborn to religion (which should be exactly what they want) and to then do something good in the final years of their lives within the confines of prison.

"Thou shalt not kill," for these religious fruitcakes, apparently has some footnotes that I've never seen written in their Bible. Their Commandment allows for killing of innocent prisoners, or for killing Iraqis who never attacked us. The fundementalists that yelp about a "culture of life" have all sorts of loopholes that just are not written in "Thou shalt not kill."

I'm hear to tell those fundementalists that I don't want any of your misguided help if I'm comatose. They must stay away from my bedside when they pull the plug because unlike them I'm not afraid of dying, I have no fear of the unknown, and God will deal with me as He/She will, not as some lunatic fundementalist would have God act.