Now you see it... now you don't
I was just cleaning out my computer mouse because it was moving all jerky on the screen. I took out the ball and started picking at the tiny lint buildup inside. While I was doing this, I took note of the movement on the screen. Then, I started manipulating the two "poles" inside to try to get the curser where I wanted it to go. I'm sure you all have noticed this before... but, playing with the inside of the mouse was reminiscent of playing with an Etch-a-Sketch growing up. I wonder if the guy who designed the components of the computer mouse was inspired by fooling around with an Etch-a-Sketch on a slow day.
My husband is so cute. He was on the computer last night and I was sitting behind him scratching his back, like we do almost every evening. Since I didn't have my glasses on, it was difficult to see what kind of website he was looking at. He stood up and said, "don't move, I'll be right back." Ok... he comes back into the room with two cardboard TP rolls and sits back down. Just as I was asking what he was doing, he held them up to his eyes like binoculars and moved in toward the screen. It was so funny. He was looking at "stereo photos"... they just look like two normal photos next to each other, but when you view them a certain way, they appear to converge into one 3D photo. This one happened to be of the Statue of Liberty. After looking at it for a bit, he put down the cardboard and said, "I never could see those illusions, just like those Magic Eye prints."
We had quite the conversation about those Magic Eye prints about 2 years ago. He was certain it was all just a hoax because he couldn't see anything in them. We probably spent 20 minutes gazing into books of them in Barnes n' Noble that night until I convinced him that they were legitimate because I was able to name the subjects before looking them up in the back of the book.
I wasn't sure what to think of this at first. Does she really want to die?, etc. Then, more and more facts came out: The husband moved on to another relationship very soon and they had a little girl together. I would imagine they desire to marry and feel that they can't really move on. He can legally divorce her but won't because it would give back to her parents the legal guardianship over her. What would he care? This guy is so passionate about the fact that his wife wants to die and he goes on and on about how horrible it is to prolong the dying process... I wonder if there's an even more urgent reason for him to want her dead. My husband suggested that perhaps he was the one who caused the "chemical imbalance" in the first place which caused her heart-attack in 1990, and that if she was rehabilitated properly, she would certainly let it be known. That is starting to sound like a good possibility to me.
I have another beef with the whole "being kept alive artificially" argument. It implies that one or more essential body functions are being mechanically induced: heart-beats, breathing, etc. To my understanding, this woman has all of her bodily functions working properly. She is merely being fed. And for it to be legal, without written request by the patient herself, to stop feeding someone is murder. If this were ok'd by the court after all the ping-ponging that's going on right now, then thousands more people who are unable to feed themselves are at risk of losing their lives, by a single verbal order of their guardian. Hey, babies can't feed themselves, but do we let them die? (Oh, that doesn't count because healthy babies die violently every day en-womb). People try to starve themselves, but do we not intervene? I know there are many things I haven't taken into consideration here, but there are many things the lawyers refuse to address as well.