Welcome to 201k.com - A Commonwealth Perspective.

Dear 201k,

I stumbled on your site a few days ago as I was doing some web searches on the Terri Schiavo case. What little I had read was pretty difficult to understand. Part of this was due to reaching Terri's parent's website first. Your site naturally pointed me to the research site that had a rather more detailed timeline on it with document references (interestingly the documents are linked to the terrisfight.net archive). Being the compulsive fool that I am I ended up reading nearly everything, particularly the report written by the GAL to Jeb Bush.

Things started to come into better focus. My father died from cancer and the desperate hopes that my family and I had for his recovery never left until the end. Terri's parents have clearly lost touch with reality and are willing to believe anyone who will offer them hope no matter how faint. I feel sad for them since I can understand the difficulty of letting go. Its harder for them no doubt since Terri could stick around indefinitely. My sympathies are limited however, since they have decided to engage in a rather mean spirited attack on Terri's husband. Naturally, our spiritual guides from the religious right have interjected themselves into a debate that has long been over. The recent attention by Mr. DeLay, the paragon of ethics he is, would be funny if it was not compounding our rather public tragedy.

The truly tragic thing about all of this is that we are spending so much of our attention, energy and resources on a woman who can't be helped while we ignore all of the other more pressing cases around us. Frankly in the best of cases these people are living in a fantasy world, and more often they are hypocritical and power hungry.

Thanks for you entertaining insights, on this and other matters.

Paul

Thank you, Paul.

Two of 201k's main contributors lost fathers to cancer; the editor lost his to brain cancer while he was in high school. His father--and the family--were spared the slow agony of dashed hope by an immediate, finite diagnosis, and were spared the prognosis of a long, slow physical and mental deterioration by a sudden aneurysm. We have always appreciated the relative good fortune of that. As you know, in those circumstances you take whatever comfort comes your way.

201k is not at all unsympathetic to Terri Schiavo, her husband, or her family. We have strived to keep emotions out of our commentary in order to focus on the pernicious legal damage that's being done behind a screen of emotion and "faith". We predicted the inevitable sad outcome of this tragedy the day the Florida courts rendered their decision--what's been left to say on the subject has been driven by the actions of those who would use it to further their political agenda, and those who obscure or ignore the truth out of either fear or sympathy for the cause.

The level of damage has unfortunately dwarfed the personal tragedy that begot it.