Open letter to the White House - the death of Terri Schiavo
Dear Mr. President,
In the midst of my sadness at the death of Terri Schiavo, a woman who was denied the right to die in peace because of your interference and that of your pack of wolves, I read this statement from you: "The essence of civilization is that the strong have a duty to protect the weak." Tell me something, sir - were you sleeping all through Sunday school and civics class?
If you had paid attention in civics class, for instance, you would have learned that the "essence of civilization" is not the duty to protect the weak, but life according to the rule of law rather than the caprice of rulers. This is basic conservative doctrine; we know you don't read, but surely someone told you that. It was spelled out clearly by one of conservatism's founders, Thomas Hobbes, who asserted that civilization is better than life in the state of nature not because civilization is inherently superior, but because anything is better than lawlessness, in which life is "nasty, brutish and short." Well, your Republican buddies in Congress have imported the nasty and brutish part into our civilization now; let's hope they don't import the rest. In any case, you and they have now prioritized your own caprice over the rule of law, and thus weakened the civilization you claim to respect. Granted that civilized humans sometimes find it necessary to live by a law higher than human law, that higher law doesn't usually include a statement that human laws can be ignored whenever we don't like the results of court decisions.
As for the duty to protect the weak and your evident inattention in Sunday school, may I ask why you find this duty so compelling now when you have ignored it for the past four years or even longer? Have you ever protected the weak? You did not protect the citizens of Texas from devastating pollution. You did not protect the death row inmates of Texas from the effects of a chief executive (you) who spent a mere 15 minutes on each of their cases. You did not protect the elderly from pharmaceutical corporate greed. You did not protect bankrupt American citizens from the greed of credit card companies. You did not protect the citizens of Iraq from the effects of poor intelligence, poor planning and poor execution when you removed Saddam Hussein from power, nor did you protect them from Hussein himself when you and your cronies found it convenient and profitable to do business with him. You are not now seeking to protect a delicate Alaskan ecosystem from further corporate greed, nor do you seek to protect the worldwide ecosystem from that same corporate greed. You've never even protected a brain-dead person on a feeding tube before now, and your friend Mr. DeLay went so far as to pull the plug on his own father. You have sided with the strong in each and every case, and I could go on, but really I think you have never used your power to protect the weak in your life; what's so special about poor Ms. Schiavo?
And after all this, you get on the national soapbox and grandly proclaim that "the essence of civilization is that the strong have a duty to protect the weak."
Mr. President, you are either a morally hollow man through and through or you are simply delusional. Either way, I have a suggestion: You obviously need some time for rest and reflection, at the very least to improve your rhetoric, so why don't you just go back to your big ranch in Crawford and relax for the next four years and let someone run the country who knows how?
In the midst of my sadness at the death of Terri Schiavo, a woman who was denied the right to die in peace because of your interference and that of your pack of wolves, I read this statement from you: "The essence of civilization is that the strong have a duty to protect the weak." Tell me something, sir - were you sleeping all through Sunday school and civics class?
If you had paid attention in civics class, for instance, you would have learned that the "essence of civilization" is not the duty to protect the weak, but life according to the rule of law rather than the caprice of rulers. This is basic conservative doctrine; we know you don't read, but surely someone told you that. It was spelled out clearly by one of conservatism's founders, Thomas Hobbes, who asserted that civilization is better than life in the state of nature not because civilization is inherently superior, but because anything is better than lawlessness, in which life is "nasty, brutish and short." Well, your Republican buddies in Congress have imported the nasty and brutish part into our civilization now; let's hope they don't import the rest. In any case, you and they have now prioritized your own caprice over the rule of law, and thus weakened the civilization you claim to respect. Granted that civilized humans sometimes find it necessary to live by a law higher than human law, that higher law doesn't usually include a statement that human laws can be ignored whenever we don't like the results of court decisions.
As for the duty to protect the weak and your evident inattention in Sunday school, may I ask why you find this duty so compelling now when you have ignored it for the past four years or even longer? Have you ever protected the weak? You did not protect the citizens of Texas from devastating pollution. You did not protect the death row inmates of Texas from the effects of a chief executive (you) who spent a mere 15 minutes on each of their cases. You did not protect the elderly from pharmaceutical corporate greed. You did not protect bankrupt American citizens from the greed of credit card companies. You did not protect the citizens of Iraq from the effects of poor intelligence, poor planning and poor execution when you removed Saddam Hussein from power, nor did you protect them from Hussein himself when you and your cronies found it convenient and profitable to do business with him. You are not now seeking to protect a delicate Alaskan ecosystem from further corporate greed, nor do you seek to protect the worldwide ecosystem from that same corporate greed. You've never even protected a brain-dead person on a feeding tube before now, and your friend Mr. DeLay went so far as to pull the plug on his own father. You have sided with the strong in each and every case, and I could go on, but really I think you have never used your power to protect the weak in your life; what's so special about poor Ms. Schiavo?
And after all this, you get on the national soapbox and grandly proclaim that "the essence of civilization is that the strong have a duty to protect the weak."
Mr. President, you are either a morally hollow man through and through or you are simply delusional. Either way, I have a suggestion: You obviously need some time for rest and reflection, at the very least to improve your rhetoric, so why don't you just go back to your big ranch in Crawford and relax for the next four years and let someone run the country who knows how?
posted by benshlomo at 11:51 AM
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