Media Whores and the Bloggrrl Who Loathes Them

Oh for cripes sake. Every time I resolve not to write another flippin’ word about the Schiavo mess, something else happens that just about sends me halfway to the moon:

The Rev. Jesse Jackson pleaded on Tuesday for Terri Schiavo to be kept alive as the brain-damaged Florida woman at the center of a bitter family and political dispute slipped toward death.

"She is being starved to death, she is being dehydrated to death. That's immoral and unnecessary," the civil rights leader told reporters after meeting Schiavo's parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, near the hospice where she is being cared for.

You know what? Fuck off. I’m so sick of this bullshit. There’s absolutely nothing either immoral or unnecessary about ending the life of someone who requested not to be kept alive by extraordinary measures. Decisions like this have to be made by families across the country every day, and no one was (literally) making a federal case out of the hundreds? thousands? of people who are removed from respirators, feeding tubes, etc. until the Schindlers started their crusade on behalf of their poor, unhelpable daughter. God damn them if they end up taking away our rights to sign living wills and DNR orders because people like infinitely idiotic Jesse Jackson have jumped on the bandwagon about how “immoral and unnecessary” it all is. It’s bad enough we can’t request a needle in our arms to die a painless and dignified death the way our pets can, even if we’ve been diagnosed with some uncurable death sentence, but so help me, if the tumult these selfish, desperate people have caused takes away the rights of others to die in the same situation as their daughter, I will leave this country and never return.

The Schindler's invited Jackson to visit to boost their effort to keep their daughter alive against court orders and her husband's wishes.

One inveterate media whore deserves another, I guess.

Michael Schiavo believes his wife, 41 and severely brain-damaged for 15 years, would never have wanted to live in this state.

"This is one of the profound moral issues of our time," said Jackson, adding he was in touch with members of the Florida legislature to try to get them to intervene.

You know what, Jesse? You’re right. And you’re on the wrong fucking side of it, buddy.

"We ask today for some hard hearts to be softened up."

What a pile of dog wank that is! Like my support of the removal of her feeding tube (which is a totally obnoxious thing to have to say; why did her parents insist on making this a public spectacle upon which we all were compelled to form an opinion?) is really down to a hard heart. To the contrary, I feel very deeply. My compassion, however, is for Terri. I believe she did tell her husband she wouldn’t want to live like that, and you know why? Because 87% of people say the same fucking thing, and the other 13% are probably the idiots calling the Sean Hannity Show with a painfully evident misunderstanding of what her condition actually is.

And my compassion is for Terri because all the plonkers who are fighting so hard for her life regard her as little more than a political tool to advance their agenda, and though they are accusing liberals of the same thing, what agenda, exactly is that? The agenda that every person should have a say over his or her own life? Well, fine—then that’s my agenda. But really all I can think about is the shell of a human, mindless and senseless and never destined to recover, and how her wishes in all of this have become secondary. Even the headlines themselves ignore them as they blare that the Schindlers have lost their latest bid, rather than suggesting instead that Terri has gotten one step closer to having her wishes fulfilled. She is a pawn in a game that I can well imagine was being played long before her tragic injury, self-inflicted, we ought remember, as a result of a disease that is found in those who struggle to properly manage control over their own lives, whether due to external or internal circumstance, or both.

Let her finally win this battle. Let her will, at long last, be done.