Kofi and Kojo aside, do these wholly disparate stories of parent life and child death tell us anything? Again, these people have nothing to do with one another except for the fact that none of these adult children died a natural death. Terri was starved to death at her husband's behest by the state; Raed was a family-feted suicide-bomber; and Hatun was murdered, allegedly by her brothers, to restore "honor" to her family. In other words, some considerable measure of family approval sanctioned all these deaths. Their lives were determined to be worse than their deaths.
Somehow, this combined experience put me in mind of something I recall from an earlier year in the "war on terror." I can't recall if it was in an Osama rant, a Zarqawi lament, or whether it was just the rhetoric of some frothing jihadi on the Internet. But I do remember taking pride in the blunt, cross-cultural attempt at a put-down: "You love life the way we love death," it went.
You bet. Or so I thought. Maybe, after what Terry Schiavo, even in her profoundly diminished state, has revealed about her fellow citizens, it would have been more accurate for that jihadi to have accused us of loving quality of life, a conditional state of being that is none too categorical. And much less so than I thought back when "mercy death" conjured up the release of a comatose, machine-dependent, painwracked mortal to his maker -- not the starvation of a brain-damaged lady who needed just three liquid squares to make it through the day.
You love some life, the jihadi might have said, the way we love some death -- for what is paradise without 72 virgins? A bad dream, to say the least, but hardly worth the trouble of infidel-murder and self-detonation. It is a paradox, surely, that the "martyr's" afterlife in paradise is defined by fleshy rewards -- a brothel everlasting -- while, in theory and in faith, a Western "culture of life" on earth makes no physical promise. But a culture of the quality of life may be something else again. It only loves some life better than death. Which makes me wonder if it can ward off a jihadi.