Did you realize the Terri Schaivo story is not the first "food and fluids" end of life story which involved a bitterly divided family?
"The big question is why. Why did this story, of all stories, reach such a critical mass; why did Terri Schiavo, of all people, ignite such a deep, visceral emotional response in so many of her fellow citizens; why have so many people devoted so much energy and commitment to this case--some utterly intent upon keeping her alive, others adamantly believing she should be left to die as quickly as possible?
After all, hers is hardly the first "food and fluids" case to have bitterly divided a family, and it won't be the last. Nor is it at all uncommon in America for patients who are Terri's age and younger to be deprived of food and water so that they will die, even when there is doubt about what they would choose in such circumstances, and even though they are neither brain dead nor terminally ill."
The answer? According to Wesley Smith, the internet.
Update #1:
William Meisheid has a similar post called Butterfiles And Tipping Points . He references a post from the Belmont Club called The Butterfly Takes Wing.
What is up with the buttefly metaphor?
"Butterfly effect" is a phrase that encapsulates the more technical notion of sensitive dependence on initial conditions in chaos theory. The idea is that small variations in the initial conditions of a dynamical system can produce large variations in the long term behavior of the system.
Edward Lorenz first analyzed the effect in a 1963 paper for the New York Academy of Sciences. According to the paper, "One meteorologist remarked that if the theory were correct, one flap of a seagull's wings would be enough to alter the course of the weather forever." Later speeches and papers by Lorenz used the more poetic butterfly, possibly inspired by the 1952 Ray Bradbury short story A Sound of Thunder. In that story, a time traveller accidentally steps on a butterfly in the distant past, causing broad changes in the present. A common description of the effect says that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can cause a tornado in Texas months later.
My own particular angle for this post on the Schiavo story is how a small, not very unique story, turned the nation on its head. One family was able to move all three branches of government into action, and get the nation to focus on its story and meme ("Terri is a person who is alive and can recover") ... even in the midst of a war on terror, tectonic shifts of power in the middle east, and a sick pope approaching death. Without the internet, it does not happen.
Meisheid agrees but takes it a step further (quoting him from his comments):
"My point of observation is that the Internet and the blogosphere is what makes this different and self-reinforcing. The printing press ushered in the Enlightenment and the Reformation, both of which caused titanic and bloody shifts in Western Civilization. Yet even those moments of change were moderated by time and limited distribution. Our instant access and the immediate feedback loops of blogstorms don’t always allow enough time for us to digest rather than react.
Absolute freedom of action and expression can be like nuclear fission, uncontrolled and potentially distructive, especially when it occurs in a critical mass. We have not yet learned, at least from my perspective, to balance this freedom with the necessary restraints or even yet defined what they should or could be."
Update #2
David Opderbeck suggests conservative talk radio deserves a lot of the credit for the "Terri is alive and can recover" meme taking hold. He is right about that. But without the internet, would talk radio have ever heard of Terri Schiavo? Why did they not pick up on all of the other dramatic family feud, "food and fluids" cases?