Err on the Side of Life

Today I took the time reflect: on what a wonderful world this must be, for God to allow us, once again, to tear ourselves apart over the matter of life and death. We mere mortals now find ourselves in complete authority over a particular person's final fate, forcing us to call into question the very nature of death itself.
It appears Terri Shiavo is not going to get her feeding tube reinserted; I suspect these are the final days of the controversy. We hear - one one side - dozens of court appointed and independent medical experts saying that Schiavo has no hope of recovery. You see, her cerebral cortex, the part of the brain that controls cognitive thought, has shriveled to the point of nonexistence. She will never be able to think again.
Others, however, cling to the hope that Schiavo can recover. They are hoping AGAINST HOPE that somehow, a part of Terri's soul, her mind, what makes her human, still remains in that body. They cling to the evidence of a four year-old videotype documenting what appears to be Terri responding with smiles and laughter towards those around her. This tape has been carefully edited to mislead...it's very likely that every phrase said to Terri was repeatedly given, and that the response shown on the tape was simply the best out of many; or the only one out of many.
Even those who recognize the hopelessness of the case are not inexcused. Are we really supposed to sit back while Terri's parents, obviously traumatized, watch their daughter starve to death over the course of days. The suffering of all could be lessened, but euthanasia is illegal in Florida. There is no soul of Terri left in her shell of a body. Is there any left in us?
Tom Delay, the leader of the Republican House of Representatives, is fighting to continue to support Terri's body in a persistent vegetative state. He claims we should as Americans should "err on the side of life" in issues like these. So does the President. Yes, the President that executes convicted death-row inmates even with significant relevations of judicial bribery, jury irregularity and DNA evidence having been brought to his attention. The same President that leapt headlong into a disastrous war in Iraq, believing that inaction was worse than action without the facts; the greatest error of all. These folk claim to be the ethical arbiters, the final authority on life and death. Follow their lead, everyone. Err on the side of life, kids.
Err on the side of life.

And It Got Me Thinking...

Today's Sunday. Like the perennially virtuous Christian that I am (sarcasm intended), I went to hear the debriefing on my Presbyterian Church's mission trip to Honduras.

They spent a week in this poor Honduran village building half a dozen concrete homes for families of five to ten people.

This is a dirt-poor, small village. They obtained their small plot of land under novel circumstances. The city-dwellers beyond the village, whose bars and stores and hotels are all owned by the ridiculously rich landowners of Honduras, call them "squatters" for their actions in gaining the land on which the village stand, 15 years ago. The village's residents look back on that time with pride and sadness, remembering the blood that was spilt in order to regain their ancestral lands. Remembering the former tribal leader who was shot and killed, the several men who were wounded, and the many men who were imprisoned.

My friends in the congregation spent a week helping them build a better life, standing in the face of the rich landowners who stare them down the villagers ferociously. They help build a community without the help of the Honduras government, which like every other banana republic regime, will always side with the landed and the powerful.

Funny thing happened, however. My friends came back, remarking on how they realized that their charity alone, OUR charity alone, would not solve the inherent problems that plague this region. We cannot simply throw money at the poor, or stop by for a week to put up a few concrete walls. If the world continues to ignore the problems that make poverty and suffering endemic in Honduras and elsewhere in the Third World, nothing will change. Charity is not enough: justice, as my (admittedly liberal) pastor remarked, must be fought for.

Another member of the congregation, a middle-aged woman whose name escapes me, made a more interesting observation upon her return. She saw firsthand the poverty these people lived in, and began to question what her duty as a Christian was in response to her realizatoin. She asked us as a congregation: what of these vast possessions I have? What of the thousands upon thousands of dollars our country spends simply to make our children's teeth STRAIGHTER? She asked us: if we wish to truly call ourselves moral, can we spiritually afford to spend an unnecessary cent on our own comforts, while others languish in hunger and destitution?

THINK.