godofthunder9010 said:
There are countless attrocities involving huge masses of people in this world. We know with 100% certainty that they are inexcusable attrocities. So why is so much being focussed on a situation where absolute certainty is simply impossible?
To paraphrase/plagiarize someone more erudite than me: one death is a tragedy; a thousand deaths is a statistic. We know that multitudes died in Darfur, Rwanda, Somalia, the tsunami; but we don't know
who they are. But thanks to the media attention, for better or for worse, we know Terri. She's beamed into our houses or delivered to our doorstep every morning. We probably see her more than we see our own family. We know her husband, her mom, her dad, her sibs. We know her medical history. We know her religion. We know the details of her parents' relationship with her father. I'd wager most people on this board could easily list as many facts about Terri as they could about their best friend.
That's why there's this hue and cry. She has a face, she has a name, and we know who she is. And it's hard to be indifferent to that. Thousands of people dying halfway across the world -- it's overwhelming, and at the same time, remote. But when it's one lone woman, at the eye of a legal, moral, and ethical tempest, whose family is ripping itself apart while legal and medical minds decide whether she lives or dies, or is indeed already dead, and every night it's up close and personal...
Thats why we care.