Life and Death, Again

It's no good, Bush. I try to maintain my equanimity, but you've got me boiling mad again. You and your people, turning this family's personal tragedy into political theater. It's simply unconscionable. It's disgraceful. Preparing, with great fanfare, to fly back to Washington from Texas to sign a bill, when you could perfectly well sign the bill down there. What's that about, Bush, if not about making frantic signals to your people to shore up your political base?

And the bill itself? Political grandstanding by a handful of wicked, self-important men to preserve the life of a poor woman who has been effectively dead for fifteen years. I was furious to read your Delay's self-righteous words in the newspaper this morning: "We should investigate every avenue before we take the life of a living human being," he said. Did you and your people "investigate every avenue" before sending thousands to their death in Iraq, Bush? The soliders and civilians? Tens of thousands of them. You did not. Not to mention (as my wife, Ellie, reminds me,) all those people you sent to their deaths in Texas after only the most cursory review by your Gonzales, now Attorney General of the United States. And now to save one life, already dead, you move heaven and earth to pass a bill in congress to have this one poor woman's feeding tube reinstalled. Is there not the smallest incongruity there, Bush?

So I ask, not for the first time, is there no end to the arrogance and virulent self-righteousness of what you and your friends presume to call Christian values, Bush? The most Christian understanding of this situation would surely be that God, in His infinite wisdom and mercy, called this woman to him fifteen years ago, and that human beings, in their desperate need to hold on to her, refuse to accept His will. I'm not a Christian, Bush, as I'm sure you know by now. But I swear I sometimes think I have more Christianity in me than you have in your little finger.

I'm leaving in a few moments now for my Sunday morning sangha--that's a little Buddhist community, Bush--to sit in silent meditation for an hour. No prayers, no pleading with God, no worship. Just deep inner silence, which sometimes leads to flashes of sudden insight into what's true and right. I'll dedicate my sit this morning to Terri Schiavo. May she find peace.