Orson Scott Card weighs in on questions that arise from the Terri Sciavo case. One of the reasons this case continues to command attention is that it touches on an unexpected variety of issues.
It wasn't that many years ago when I happened to be in Raleigh at a gathering of literary folk who were quite full of their own superiority. They started talking about people who (gasp!) let years go by without reading a single book. "Why do they even bother being alive?" asked one of them. Almost everyone laughed. They went on and on about the worthlessness of the lives of non-intellectuals. Shopping in malls. Eating at McDonald's. Driving their gas-guzzling cars. I did ask where they shopped, and which of them had arrived at the party by balloon. I have not been invited to such gatherings since.
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A hot-air balloon would have been very effective in that crowd.
But from speaking casually about the worthlessness of certain lives to judging quality of life is a stretch. Isn't it? But "quality of life" has been a major theme in life-and-death arguments over the past weeks.
The nattering of intellectuals about the valuelessness of the "unexamined life" might be taken as hyperbole, if it weren't for the fact that it is precisely our intellectual elite that has decided to set itself up as champions of the right to murder people "for their own good." We saw how intellectuals treat the issue in this year's Oscar-winning deathwish movie, Million Dollar Baby. By now everyone knows that at the end, Hilary Swank lies in a bed, paralyzed from the neck down. Because of bedsores, one leg is amputated. So, in despair, she begs Clint Eastwood to kill her. And when he won't, she tries to kill herself by biting off her own tongue. At last he succumbs, becomes a murderer for her sake, and walks away as the audience weeps at the nobility of his sacrifice.
Is it unfair to compare this case with real quadriplegics? Say, with Christopher Reeve? In a way, it is.
Hillary Swank's character was made up. She did what the author decided she should do. So after we see her grimly determined to overcome all obstacles, unwilling to be discouraged, adapting to whatever circumstances try to thwart her, suddenly the author decides that this time she'll give up and start demanding that the people who love her most surrender their sense of decency and goodness in order to indulge her despair. Do you think Christopher Reeve didn't feel despair? He said so, in various interviews; there were even times he wished he were dead; but the love and encouragement of his family and friends gave him new purpose.
...most people, given anything to hold on to, adapt and try. They find new purpose. They find work-arounds. The quadriplegics who learn to paint with a brush held between their teeth. Helen Keller. Stephen Hawking. I suppose, though, that we should have simply killed them as soon as the incurability of their problems became obvious. After all, what "quality of life" could they possibly have?
Card notes that people make their own quality of life. Or, as Abraham Lincoln is famously quoted as saying, "Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be."
It's easy to judge quality of life, or a person's ability to be happy, from outside. Yet somehow, the judgment is never quite the same as the one made by the person who lives that life, from the inside.
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