Terry Shaivo [unfinished]

Originally, I wanted to make this column another partisan rant about Terri Shiavo in league with everything else filling the airwaves and op-ed pages of newspapers. I wanted to point out the ethical obscenity of a political party that has no problem having Medicaid paying most of the $80,000 a year medical bills of a brain dead women but refuses to discuss the possibility of making healthcare a not-for-profit industry like every other industrialized nation has. I wanted to dwell on how sad it is to see this helpless soul caught in the first bout of 2006 campaign posturing but then I realized I would be playing right into that very game and skirting more important issues.

Despite 65% of Americans realizing that this more a political circus than a morally driven crusade, most of us are genuinely concerned over the repercussions it will have on the American political landscape. This media circus spotlight on Shaivo highlights the deepest philosophical and ethical debate of our time: what is life worth and how equally distributed is that worthwhility?

To break my view of the Shaivo circus down to its crudest and truest form, it is my contention that in a world as ours of finite resources and starvation it is not worth the time or money to sustain the breath of a woman brain-dead for 15 years. Being that she has lost sentience – the ability to comprehend her own existence - she is merely a shell of human life. She is propped like a puppet with tubes instead of strings, complete with involuntary motor reflexes reacting to stimuli that captivate the true believers who desperately want to see consciousness churn beneath her eyes

My own feelings on the Shaivo case have begged difficult questions. Does a paralyzed deaf, mute, blind and severely retarded man have the same right to live as I do? What exactly would be the cognitive cut-off point where someone begins loosing their rights? Who decides?

I don’t think the questions get any easier for the right-wingers backing Shaivo’s parents. One could vaccinate 28,500 children in impoverished nations with the $80,000 a year it takes to keep Terri Shiavo breathing. That speaks nothing of the 43 million Americans without health insurance. The pro-life movement seems concerned with life only when it appears as a glow, a waxing or waning of pre-birth and near-death. What about preserving the life we already have?

Underling this entire debate is a perforated fantasy that almost every American believes in: no human has the right to kill another human. The holes become wider after terrorist attacks and serial killings. The holes become indefinable and smaller when it comes to civilian death in war, “collateral damage,” or unhooking the elderly from breathing tubes, or terminating pregnancies.

All life is not sacred to the vast majority of us. We pick and choose our [unfinished because it was unpublished [Richard wrote an editorial on this very topic to my surprise])

In Memory of Gonzo

Though Dr. Hunter S. Thompson nauseated most, he intrigued the rest of us through his undiluted and manic caricature of the American Dream marked with a hedonistic realization of the pursuit of happiness and a self-authoritarian styled liberty of conscious few will ever acquire. Dropping ink and acid lavishly, he chronicled the excesses of American culture - Vegas, Nixon’s re-election campaign, biker gangs, etc - by living through them in a detached psychedelic haze rich in absurd details provoked largely by his own interactions. His death was but a detour of a wildly self-destructive life where he always remained firmly in command of his own downward spiral.

Social Security Reform

After I blew out the transmission in my first car (a Ford, imagine that) my father asked if it was doing anything funny before the final death throw. I told him yes, but that I just didn’t have the money to fix it and would rather suffer the drivetrain oddities than shell out cash from my anemic McPaychecks. He told me something that I’ve followed to this day: fixing problems early is hella cheaper than waiting until the entire system collapses.

Accordingly, I applaud Bush for pushing Social Security reform. Though the devils are in the details and I might not agree with him that the system is heading for guaranteed solvency in coming decades, I do believe the margins of error are too tight for comfort. I applaud him for having the political courage to reach out, touch that political third rail, and look at a problem before it blows up in our collective faces, potentially costing our generation the social safety net we are expecting.

Democrats should take a skeptical stance right now, in contrast to unflinching opposition. This is an assured method to be left out of the negotiation process. I earnestly want to believe Bush when he said he was open to any suggestion that allows for some sort of private account, does not raise payroll taxes, and is not a temporary solution. These are terms that Democrats should agree to on an ad hoc basis for the sake of coming to an acceptable compromise with a hesitant Republican majority.

Much the same as with Bush’s original tax cut proposal, his numbers are elephantine (and economically disastrous) on purpose – starting on higher ground to wage battle so that the inches ceded leave him with a result closer to his original goals. Allowing the Social Security to have its income slashed by 65% (4% of income, which will come out of the 6.2% payroll rate) would bankrupt the system as we know it. Though guaranteeing funding, albeit smaller than current payouts, for current freshman, it would nonetheless axe benefits for the non-traditional students. Already well into their careers, they have subsequently not had time to significantly pay into these accounts before costs exceed revenues in 2012 because of the accounts.

Bush purportedly has not ruled out raising the ceiling on taxable income. Currently, Social Security dishes out benefits proportional to what workers put in while they worked. In a bit of regressive-tax logic, only the first $90,000 of income is taxable – maxing out at $5580 a year. In raw numbers, that means that most liberal arts UNF graduates will be taxed 6.2% on all income, while an MBA peer making $900,000 yearly is only paying a tenth your tax rate at .62%.

Depending on Republican momentum on this issue, it is likely Democrats will have to make a “deal with the devil” to ensure the survival of America’s largest entitlement program’s. If allowing for small private accounts is necessary to eliminate the taxable income bar and make other steps necessary to ensure the programs solvency, , then that's a deal that should be made.

Iran and Such

Rumors of an impending invasion of Iran are a wild overstatement of what the administration is considering. These rumors stem from a New Yorker article written by Seymour Hersh, who broke the Abu Ghraib story, that US special operations teams were scouting Iran looking for targets for a potential air strike should negotiations with the EU to close a nuclear power plant collapse. The simple truth is that we do not have the means to occupy a nation with nearly three times the land mass and population as Iraq.

In columns I wrote nearly a year ago I supported such air strikes against Iran. I argued that nations with significant military threats and minimal means of defense have no reason to negotiate away their only deterrence, weapons of mass destruction. Negotiating away even small percentages of our overwhelmingly redundant and oftentimes obsolete array of nuclear weapons can take years to complete even when the tradeoff has been fewer nuclear weapons aimed against us. Consequently, the only way you could take care of proliferation threats is to attack them in their nascent stages, the way Israel attacked Saddam’s Osirak nuclear complex in 1981.

The reason I am more reluctant today to support such a direct attack on Iran’s nuclear facility is because Iran is much more of a position to retaliate than Iraq was in 2003 or Iran was in the same year, when the degree of the nuclear threat became more lucid. Launching a military strike on Iran would be a declaration of war which would be fought both in our own cities and in Iraq. Iran holds many of the cards in Iraq and would no doubt go out of its way to provide the weapons, cash, and intelligence to insurgents. The Shi’ite city of Basra would quickly become the next Fallujah, conveniently blocking major access to the rest of Iraq from logistical bases in Kuwait.

A bigger danger is Hezbollah, the “Party of God” that was founded by the Iranians to spread the Islamic Revolution. Deputy of State Richard Armitage has been quoted as saying that it might well be that al Qaeda is the “B-team” of terrorism and Hezbollah is the “A-team.” They were in large part responsible for America’s withdrawal from Lebanon in the 1980’s, killing 241 Marines in their barracks in 1983. The consequences would be devastating were Hezbollah deployed in America.

We must approach this delicate situation with the respect that it deserves. We must abandon our view that only America and its allies have the right to a nuclear defense, though we should act vigilantly to stop proliferation. We must realize that the more we threaten, the more likely nations will want to deter. We must also accept the danger we will be putting ourselves into should we choose to launch air strikes against Iran.