I spent the last week marveling at the reasonableness of the American people, and feeling bad for all the people close to Terri Schiavo. They seem trapped in an especially hot ring of hell. But as the case dragged on, I began to feel sorry for the American people and to wonder at the relatives.
In an admirable twist on our current politics, Americans refused to line up in ideological order on the matter of Schiavo's life and death. Sixty-nine percent said they would have wanted the feeding tube removed if they were in Schiavo's condition, and 75 percent said that Congress should not have intervened -- 5 percent more than the 70 percent who said that the president should have stayed out of it.
Despite the wall-to-wall cable coverage, the blogging, the gazillion of words dedicated to the subject by journalists, pundits, and polemicists, people seemed to know that we ventured inside one family's private torment and that we have no business being there.
Samuel Johnson once noted “that knowledge is advanced by an intercourse of sentiments, and an exchange of observations, and that the bosom is disburdened by a communication of its cares, is too well known for proof or illustration.”
We have well communicated our cares and exchanged our observations on Terri Schiavo, and the intercouse of sentiments is now completely out of hand. But have we learned anything?
Congress plans hearings on the rights of the disabled when it returns from the Easter recess. But according to the polls, Congress and the White House were the most egregious offenders with their intervention into this matter. Regardless of where they came down on the issue, Americans, by large margins, did not think this was any business of the country's elected officials.
In a Time magazine poll, 65 percent said that the federal intervention was more politics that principle, and 54 percent said that they were more likely to vote against congressional representatives who voted to allow the case to be heard in federal court.
But as this case approached today's sad and sure ending, the more dismayed I grew by those whom I had also regarded as victims in the case: the warring family factions -- the Schiavos, the Schindlers, and their various surrogates who force-fed us their tragedy in snippets and sound bites. The Congress and the White House may indeed have been meddling when they marshaled the national legislature to move this case to federal court, but we have to ask: What kind of family would allow this to get into the courts in the first place -- and then allow it to drag on?
Capitulation by one side or the other would have seemed heroic, because whatever else we don't know, we can be sure that Terri Schiavo would not have wanted to be the center of this freak show.
Michael Schiavo allowed his dying wife to receive the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church on Easter Sunday. When her family wanted her to have communion again on Tuesday, we found out that getting communion, or a drop of wine on the tongue for her, was governed by court order.
“NO REST IN PEACE,” screamed Monday's New York Daily News, taking note of the brewing fight over how and where Schiavo will be laid to rest. Her husband says she wants to be cremated and plans to bury her in his family plot in Pennsylvania. Her parents want a wake, an open-casket Catholic funeral, and would like her buried near their home in Florida so they can visit the grave.
We have to hope that neither side thinks it's a good idea to litigate this disagreement, but what are a few more billable hours in these circles?
Terence Samuel is the chief congressional correspondent for U.S. News & World Report. His column about politics appears each week in the Prospect's online edition.
