Other Columns by Kevin Fobbs
Kevin Fobbs Bio

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He was an author of the macabre -- an artist who relished in morbid artwork. A failed movie producer who perfected a machine in 1989 called "the Thanatron" -- meaning "death machine" in Greek -- which he used the very next year to usher in an era -- a new era labeled for his moniker, "Dr. Death" inextricably tied to a new culture of death. Approximately 130 people became victims of his death machine -- including one 27 year-old Floridian woman. Her name: Terri Schindler Schiavo who ultimately became victim to the culture Dr. Death created.

Michigan plays a significant role in what is becoming a reawakening of the Culture of Life. For more than a decade and a half we Michiganians watched as the death culture began to wrap its tentacles around our beliefs, our mores, and our moral fabric. We saw a doctor begin to pedal his somewhat intoxicating message of death without any sense of guilt, death without any sense of responsibility as if the only message in Dr. Jack Kevorkian's mind was "life is tough...let's quit."

Kevorkian literally meant quit -- permanently. His suggestions were easy to embrace for many of his victims. And I do say victims because he was not doing them some magnanimous favor; he was setting the stage for the millions of Americans who believed what Adolph Hitler believed over sixty years ago. Life can be marginalized, the end of life can be minimalized, and giving the state the ability to punish an innocent by starving that person to death because he, or in this case Terri Schiavo, did not meet someone's unspecified quality-of-life standards.

But those of us in Michigan and many throughout the nation were not alarmed when Dr. Jack Kevorkian began his nearly ten-year trek throughout the Detroit area even though history would soon record him and his new societal message as "convenient," tolerant, and easy. Death and killing oneself became a "right" and not far behind this revelation was the State and its right to now kill you with ease as well.

No alarm bells went off in the life of Terri Schiavo because this young women -- just in her late twenties -- had no real reason to fear that as she was celebrating her new marriage and new husband that same husband and this same doctor's new death dance would be embracing a new partner and that new partner would in a few short years would be her.

Terri's new husband never spoke up about his supposed knowledge of Terri's end-of-life desires despite the fact that he knew she was a devout Catholic, and despite the fact that he had every opportunity in the world. He didn't tell the world until the check cleared the bank -- not even the courtroom judge -- that the trial to gain a million dollar insurance award, which was supposed to pay for her rehabilitation, should be stopped immediately. He never mentioned that Terri had spoken to him using some of the same words that Dr. Jack Kevorkian would have perhaps used as he lulled his victims into convenient death.

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