No Schiavo, None of the Time

I appear to be the only blogger not weighing in on the Terri Schiavo controversy, and it seems to be driving down my hit count. The Derb wrote this morning, asking me to post something penetrating and unique.

So, here goes, ... uh ... Look, here's Noah Millman's take on the subject, which is a lot more profound than you'd get from me. I'm better at seeing the in-front-of-one's-nose stuff.

I'm reminded of when I was having dinner with General William Odom, the former head of the National Security Administration, after he'd given a speech on America's Grand Strategy in the coming century. Somebody asked him his opinion of the Elian Affair, which was just beginning. (Remember Elian, the Cuban boy whose mother died coming ashore in Florida and his father wanted to take him back to Cuba?) "It's a triviaaaaaal matter," he harrumphed.

Not exactly ... Still, a lot of these human interest stories like Elian and Terri Schiavo that capture the national attention do so precisely because they are unique man-bites-dogs stories, and thus not all that instructive about broader issues.

One widespread subject, however, that modern Americans dislike talking about in public but is a very big deal and one of increasing importance is inheritance. It's hard to get any hard data on how much money Mr. Schiavo would stand to collect from his unfortunate wife's life insurance or medical trust fund if she were to die, but that may be an issue here.

In my life, I've seen normal people driven to certifiably insane behavior due to strong emotions tied to inheritance questions. The amount of wealth that is available to survivors is going up with each decade, but so are the odds that it will all be dissipated in terminal medical care. But there is almost no public discussion of inheritance these days.

By the way, I notice that there's not that much support in the polls for keeping her alive. Generally speaking, people find the the deeply ill to be depressing and wish they would go away (which is the unspoken aspect of much commentary about the Pope these days). When I had lymphatic cancer when I was 38, I was treated well by my friends, but I've seen people who were much more popular than me die slowly with practically nobody coming to visit.

My wife said that when she told people that I had cancer, lots of nonsmokers asked if I was a smoker. They were depressed to hear I wasn't, since they couldn't cheer themselves up by saying to themselves that it would never happen to them, only to bad people who smoked. (Smokers, in contrast, were distinctly bucked up by the news that I had foregone the pleasures of tobacco and was on death's doorstep anyway.)

So, back to the really important matters: BabyNameBlogging!

Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com