I'm back in Evanston now. I saw the scene and hung around for about an hour, if that. I'm tired and this entry is probably incomplete and incoherent.I went to Pinellas Park hoping for a good look at the sick human circus. What I found Wednesday were tired and limp people. This circus has been milked dry, though the people still hanging around won't ever admit that. They're banking on this, as boring as it has become. They want to wring some more life out of it. It was fun when it began, I'm sure. Now even what's outlandish about it has become tiring and bland.
About 200 of these people were milling around with their signs and rosaries on a long mud-pit that had been fenced off for the ocassion with orange plastic webbing. They've kept it up this long but the fun moral outrage is gone. An
Associated Press story describes it as "chaos." But this isn't chaos. This is just a case of people getting in the way and being lazy-dumb. It's less a storm and more a big pool of stagnant water. It's bovine but it's not a stampede.
Only one woman was making much noise. She wore a poofy pink, orange and white jogging suit, and when I first saw her she was barking at a couple of radio reporters and photographers, just blazing away at them. A large crucifix that had been propped up against the fencing had just fallen down into the trash or the mud, and that had her in a silly rage. This wasn't giving an interview; this was crazed and malignant spitting. If the reporters were going to understand her, they were going to have to meet her more than halfway.
"That's what it's gonna take! Somebody's gonna have to fall down on their face!" she shouted. She had this delirious, milky eyes. I thought she was angry with the reporters, and getting angrier, because they couldn't have worked themselves up like this about the crucifix or about any of the things that angered her. The rage just wasn't in them. Maybe she didn't understand that her raving wasn't going to change that. She was gone, too focused on the goal.
The protestors carried signs with howling slogans like "Feed Terri—Starve the Courts!" and "Jesus and Terri—Both Betrayed by a Kiss!" but it was really a scene of meek squalor. One pale and gangly woman was pacing from one end of the protestor corral to the other, preaching and staring into space, not looking for reactions or an audience but really just preaching to herself: "Glory to God, he's her protector, he's above all decisions!" Maybe he is—if these people are indulged any more than they have been, this case will result in years of judicial waffling until Schiavo dies on her own or her parents give in.
Some points just didn't seem worth making at all. "NEBRASKANS AGAINST EUTHANASIA" read one red poster with thick black lettering. These people all reminded me of a character in
Crime and Punishment, a young radical who talks and interrupts until he's told everyone exactly what his principles are, down to the pickiest little nuance. But no one needs to know, and no one cares, and this character turns himself into a ridiculous and irrelevant sideshow.
I ran into jogging-suit lady again. I overheard her shouting at a sympathetic photographer who must've been with one of the protest groups or some jerry-rigged right-wing news organization. "...storm the walls! Why not?! You ought to!" she said. I stood off to the side, writing this down but pretending not to eavesdrop, and the photographer saw me and asked who I worked for. He asked how I felt about it. I said I was neutral. The woman, who'd shut up for a moment, fired herself right back up:
"YOU'RE NEUTRAL? A WOMAN IS STARVING TO DEATH?"
I told her it wasn't my decision to make, and I knew even that wasn't worth saying. All I wanted to do was watch as this desperate face shrieked at me, looking rabid and malnourished. The photographer stepped back to shoot this, saying on top of the woman's shouts, "How can you say that? Do you not have a heart? How can you be neutral?"
She went on. "YOU'VE LOST YOUR HUMANITY! THAT'S WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE!" "You people?" The young? Media people? Or simply everyone not in her looney camp?
I shrugged. "Alright, I didn't come here to be barked at," I said, and started walking back toward the other end of the mud pit. She kept on howling after me, and some people noticed enough to give me a look. It looked like some of them were smirking—maybe gloating over what appeared to be my defeat in some argument.
"You shouldn't run away! You should engage her!" the photographer yelled at my back. And that would have been no good. There is no engagement worth having at a warped scene like this. She and I could not have had a debate, because for these people, it all rests on arbitrary conviction. You can try to summon up your sharpest arguments and wittiest speech, but it isn't worth using on them. These debates are not about the improvement or evolution of ideas. They are about being convinced that you are right and then landing in a cheap trance like the one the people had entered outside the Woodside hospice. I think what all these people have discovered is that righteousnous is for the taking, and that you can always reassure yourself that the righteousnous isn't false, however much you have to work to fuel it.
