Morality and our National Distraction

All last week, I was expecting Terri Schiavo to die. I was scanning the headlines every day. And I couldn’t help myself, either. That’s why I was resentful of my obsession—I still am. Every time I bought a paper and saw this passion play being enacted—her drained dead-or-alive face, the Christians kneeling in front of her house, Jeb Bush standing on her skinny shoulders in order to better reach the spotlight, I couldn’t help but think, “Why is this on the front page? Why is Terri Schiavo’s unknowingly pained face the one we see—and not the pain of an Iraqi in a prison camp, or an American soldier injured in the war (notice the listing of American dead quietly tucked in the centerfold of our newspapers so as not to cause the kind of uproar and sense of national crisis that Schiavo’s face could). I wished that the front page slot would be used to show some everyday, systemic life-and-death issue that is facing Americans, such as the lack of health insurance for 25 percent of us, or the real footage from Iraq, for that matter. Those systemic issues are my business, for they are in the jurisdiction of government policy—not like the life of a woman and her family feud converted into a Christian morality play.

Let’s be clear—there was more at stake in the Schiavo case than the welfare of Terri Schiavo. Her life—or really, what legally constituted her life—is still being used instrumentally by the Republican right, especially for politicians like Jeb Bush eager to prove their Christian commitments in a ready-made “trial by fire.” I think we’ve heard this all before, especially when the phrase “right to Life,” a rhetorically slippery slope, comes on the scene.

For what is it in the Bible, I ask, that makes “Life,” with a capital L, the most important Christian value, such that medical technology must be employed for its sake in every case? What about that famous psalm, “For everything there is a season?” Isn’t there a time, and maybe even a right, to die? Schiavo’s organs functioned, but she could not perform so many activities that constitute what it is to be a human that the case reached beyond a question of life’s quality. Why must the definition of life mean only the functioning of organs?

Whatever the definition is, I am certain that the right-wing members of our government want to be the ones to define it. This case was, and is, about more than just the insertion of a feeding tube. They want to come closer to defining life, which in essence is part of a better-known crusade that pits life against choice that the religious right has been waging for quite a while.

And, as in the abortion conflict, in framing the argument as Life vs. Choice, the conservatives gain the upper hand, even if they lose their legal battles for now. The wishes of Terri Schiavo and her husband/legal guardian were suddenly about the willfulness of individuals, while Life itself, with all the moral force of the word behind it, became both a collective value and a legal right that suddenly all of us were in danger of violating.

When I saw Jeb Bush’s face on the front page of the Times, I literally wanted to turn the other cheek—the whole thing smacks of some heavy paternalism. These people are quickest to call the government paternalistic when it comes to dishing out welfare checks, but there is nothing wrong with paternalism in the department of ideology. Isn’t this a reversal of the traditional role of government? All of a sudden, it is wrong for government to keep a Social Security trust fund, but it is okay that Michael Schiavo’s wife should be kept alive even against her own wishes. Soon, if the radical Republicans have their way, the only power left to the government will be the right to dictate my values.

The author is a Columbia College senior majoring in anthropology.