JUDGE WHITTEMORE, I’M PUZZLED

J. Grant Swank, Jr.

I’m not confused. I already have come to my philosophical and ethical conclusion regarding Terri Schiavo. It’s that we must preserve all life at all costs. Pulling the thread from life’s fabric at any one level means that anybody can decide the thread and level. It’s back to relativism, in other words.

Further, if we think this is a general issue, I figure just each of us wait till the time when the issue becomes quite personalized — like pointed at each of us. When will we be incapacitated? When will you be undone in a nursing home? When will we be unable to talk, to walk, to swallow? It can happen to "them." It can also occur in each of our lives. Life is unpredictable — for pleasure and for pain

So I’m for championing life for the disabled, the baby in the womb, the Alzheimer’s patient, and so forth. Once we start playing deity over another’s existence, we move into a terrain not permitted mere mortal. Though there are some egocentrics "out there" who think they can play god, they can’t. Wait till the medical tables are turned on them to see how willing they are to submit to another’s divine authority.

But what puzzles me is what US District Judge James Whittemore said to the press moments ago: "I will not tell you when, how or how long it will take.

"In God’s holy name, what is the man saying? And I mean that all sincerely, theologically moored. In the Almighty’s purview of this situation, what is Whittemore trying to communicate?

Is it that he is so overcome with complexities that he’s driven up his own judicial tree? Or is it that he’s going to bask in his own judicial power limelight for his fifteen minutes, believing that whatever decision he makes will span out for an eternity of acclaim? Or is the judge one overly sensitive mortal who is bound morally to a multi-dimensional circumstance so that he’s imploring the Lord for guidance and hasn’t received it yet?

See?

That’s the puzzlement of my own weary brain on this matter. I don’t want to prejudge the judge so as to be unfairly angry at the fellow. I don’t want to be so callous as to say he’s stalling, balking, messing around with our heads and the tears of the family. I really don’t want to be negative in my analysis of the judge’s one sentence.

But I can’t help but try to examine each one of those words in that sentence: "I will not tell you when, how or how long it will take."

I’m not a doctor either. So I don’t know how long Terri can continue without the feeding tube. But I would think in my layman’s brain that each minute ticking away without food does something negative to the system. Doesn’t it? Or can a body just go on and on blithely while a judge ponders?

After all, Congress scampered back pronto from Easter recess to do something crucial at the midnight hour plus. The President was johnny-on-the-spot to do his part. And now we are at the mercy of the judge who says he has no idea what time frame he’s going to have to have to come to a conclusion.

My. After all the emergency measures seen through quite efficiently over this past Palm Sunday weekend, I would think that the judge, very much reading up on media coverage of this situation, would have had some judicial formation as to what he would do if it came to his gavel.

Wouldn’t you think that every judge in the world has journeyed in his and her brain on this issue so as to come to his and her conclusion. "If only I were asked my decision, I’d do thus and thus." Isn’t that what one would figure when it comes to a judge being handed the grand power at this juncture?

In other words, the judge hasn’t just been handed this matter today. Not. He’s been like the rest of us — hearing about it, reading about it, discussing it. Therefore, being a judge with a judge’s way of deliberating on complexities, surely he has formed an opinion. Then why not carry out that opinion with decorum and intelligence, with a judge’s logic and breadth of experience — soon?

Yes. That’s what’s puzzling me. How can a judge with the aforementioned backdrop now say to media, "I will not tell you when, how or how long it will take?"

Whatever, he’s said it. And we are all at the mercy of the judge. All of us. Now that’s power, isn’t it? I pray that mortal power is speeding in the wise and just direction through all this. I surely do.

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