Minutes to Midnight: America in the Dock

From the pages of Life Matters! . . .

"It's high noon in America when it comes to that disabled Florida woman whose feeding tubes could be removed as early as this week," Michael Brown begins his indictment in today's Spirit Daily, continuing:

It is beyond comprehension that a nation could sit back and watch the slow, painful death of a woman who can talk, who is aware, who expresses laughter, who has swallowed on her own, who expresses fear, whose parents love her.

But those of us for whom the fight for Terri Schindler-Schiavo is not our first, our tenth, or even our 100th battle—not our first fight for life nor our last—know only too well that that surrender to the law of the jungle was made long ago and that rather than high noon, it is, if seen from an optimistic viewpoint that rivals Pollyanna, minutes to midnight in America.

• Where was the national outrage, a quarter century ago when Clarence Herbert, a 55-year-old security guard, was starved to death on doctors' orders in the Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Harbor City, CA, in 1981?


• And where was the public outcry in 1983 when the nephew of Claire Conroy, an 84 year-old resident of a New Jersey nursing home, described as "conscious but confused," sought to have her starved to death?


• And how many protested when the Florida Second District Court of Appeal—yes, that District Court—ruled that 75-year-old Helen Corbett, deemed "incompetent," could be starved to death in 1986?


• Or when 45-year-old Massachusetts fire fighter, Paul Brophy, became the first person to be starved to death on court order that same year?

Suffice it to say that he was not the last. We are well past midday indeed!

Someday, God willing, there will be another Doctors Trial like the one held in Nuremberg in 1946-1947, and those who committed such heinous crimes against humanity as starving to death innocent victims unable to defend themselves—and those who aided and abeted them—will stand in the prisoners' dock.

So too, shall a Nation that turned a deaf ear to such infamies perpetrated in its name and with the complicity of its courts. If not in man's court, then in God's, where at last the victims of man's inhumanity to man will find a tribunal where justice prevails.