Riddle me this, Batman: How come everybody found it so acceptable to make fun of Terri Schiavo?

apparently starving to death is virtually painless, the only discomfort being dry mouth (in the state she was in, she probably didn't even feel that), which can be alleviated by sucking on ice.

Then, I saw the "Thread Connections Chunka Chunka" thread...

being totally on the pipe helps too. are you kidding?

I thought so too, but I feel like I'm oversensitive to things like that so I usually don't say anything.

I really shouldn't read this thread.

her husband?

I think this sums it up nicely, though I agree with most of the posters that most of my derision has been directed toward the protesters, not Terri herself. It sucks what happened to her, but, ya know, it sucks that people die.

dude, did you read my post up above? no wonder we are married in real life. we are heartless lovebirds!

"It's occured to me that a lot of the nastiness might be as a distancing mechanism." I think that this is pretty much OTM.

At the risk of sounding callous, and since I don't know any of her family personally and cannot directly cause them grief, I don't think it's all that terrible. It certainly isn't unforeseeable. When I think of the thousands of people here who are going through similar family tragedies, seeing out their Alzheimer's stricken parents or their car crash battered children, when I think of the countless people slowly deterioating from AIDS and other diseases, when I think of the latest Indonesian quake victims or the victims in Darfur, it occurs to me that coping with death is something we all have to face (or ignore) in our own ways, with as much dignity and good humor as we can muster, and that a single death is but a drop in the bucket of our planet's woes.

I was not present when my grandfather died but there was a brief viewing before he was cremated, and I was shocked to find that I went through many different emotions during the breif period we had to say goodbye. At one point, though, we were all laughing as we recalled his many foibles and some of his better bon mots.

I don't get it.

I am sort of puzzled that she's this Holy Symbold for the wingnut crowd, but not for its opponents: clearly she should matter just as much to you (symbolically speaking) if you're on her husband's side?

(double xpost)

thank you.

Humor/remembering good things/a joke or two /= the kind of bullshit that's been on this board recently. TERRI SMASH. Uh, yeah, v. funny, genius, hurrah.

BTW those of you using the "this is how I deal with death excuse": uh in what way do you have to "deal" with the deaths of people you don't care about, are not personally acquainted with, don't know v. much about, etc?

How many of you have a dead relative? Wanna post some pictures of them? Cos I'd like to photoshop their heads into compromising, awful positions, and laugh and laugh and laugh. That'd be really funny, right? That's how I deal with their death. That person, you know, that you care about and I don't know anything about other than they exist and hey, that's funny!

xpost not a meaningless complaint. Maybe the complaint is more like "ACTUALLY BE FUNNY"

Tragedy + 0 time = 0 humor