Ashcroft Adds Salt to the Wound

I remember looking into a crib at a woman in her 80s, her translucent skin blistered with bedsores, her limbs knotted up like pieces of string, her eyes looking only inward. We tried to talk in between the convulsive, unbearable bouts of pain that bone cancer inflicts on the body.

She is gone now. But cancer isn’t. Some other grandmother lies trembling in a bed right now, repeating her agony.

I think about the friends and colleagues I’ve known who have lost weight, lost their spirit, grown bent and weak, unable to eat and hold down medicine, every cough an ordeal, their eyes fading and finally blinking shut because one or the other opportunistic disease moved in to assault their bodies left defenseless by AIDS.

I type these words at an old desk bequeathed me after the death of such a man, whose name was Roger.

Somewhere tonight there will be a vigil for another person like him. And more tomorrow.

I ask, how it can be that anyone would want to add to their suffering?

I’ll ask the follow-up question with as much bite as is in me: Why would Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft choose now, this moment, to add to the misery of our sick and dying countrymen?

Why now, at the start of this war on terrorism? Why when we’re still digging body parts out of the smoking rubble and bracing for more attacks? Why now, when Ashcroft can report so little progress in identifying or apprehending those who are doing us wrong? Why divide us now when we’re trying to hold ourselves together behind the idea that unity, if nothing else, can comfort us?

The answer, the blinding self-righteousness of Ashcroft’s old-time religion, is incomprehensible to me.

“A nation at war should not attack its wounded,” said my friend and political activist, Bill Zimmerman.

I thought every G-man in America was working double time to try and make America safe and deliver justice. After all, the president said civilization itself was at stake, not to mention its prosperity. And didn’t Congress sweep away concerns about privacy to give Ashcroft a wide-open field to pursue this menace?

What could be more compelling? What could divert Ashcroft’s attentions and make him redeploy agents and investigators from these horrifying threats to our children and ourselves?

It’s the rebellion we started here in the West. When we in California decided that a marijuana brownie wasn’t too much to offer chemotherapy patients so they could hold down their medicines without vomiting, just as long as a licensed physician approved. When voters in Oregon decided that, for truly horrible terminal illnesses, people ought to have the right to ask their doctors for the drugs to escape their final suffering.

Two weeks ago, Ashcroft dispatched 30 federal agents to raid and shut down the Los Angeles Cannibis Resource Center, where 960 sick people are registered to seek relief with approval of a doctor and, I hasten to add, with the cooperation of the county Sheriff’s Department.

Then, this week, Ashcroft announced that he was sending investigators to crack down on Oregon physicians who assist dying patients when they cannot endure any more suffering--an option used so far by only 70 desperate people in four years.

Do we really have the law-enforcement horsepower to spare for this cold-hearted crusade? Have they run out of leads? Don’t they listen to their own threats of attacks to come? Have they not seen the list of 10,000 places where America is still vulnerable?

Let’s be clear: The narrow and merciful laws that Ashcroft has attacked were approved by voter plebiscites.

Let’s be emphatic: There is no possible harm to others with these laws. These are matters settled by doctors and patients in private homes and hospices.

Let’s be angry: On the strength of its own rickety and still-disputed mandate, this administration defies millions of Americans whose mandate is unmistakable.

Let’s be just: Listen to the federal judge who Thursday temporarily suspended Ashcroft’s inhumane directive in Oregon.

If a narrow and crusading ideology were not his paramount consideration, an attorney general of the United States would have his mind focused on serious business right now, not on what happens in the candlelight behind drawn curtains on the tear-stained sickbeds of good people.