It has been all but impossible to avoid the uproar surrounding the final days of Terry Schiavo, the unfortunate brain-damaged woman in Florida, who may well have died from starvation and dehydration by the time this column is published.

No matter what radio or television station you may be tuned to, no matter what newspaper you may have been reading over the past couple of weeks, “the Terry Schiavo Case” with all its attendant political and religious scurrying, has been demeaned into a soap opera akin to a TV Reality Show.

Indeed, there have been happenings no soap opera writer could invent. The midnight flight of the president of the U.S. to get to Washington to sign a bill passed by the Senate and Congress, for instance — this from the man who has sent more than 1,500 young Americans, along with tens of thousands of Iraqis to their deaths in Iraq, without a blink of his beady little eyes.

That is political opportunism at its most malignant. There will be a TV Movie of the Week — bet on it — for the story of Terry Schiavois replete with all the characters one could wish for in any drama.

But behind all that frippery, the case of Terry Schiavo does bring elements of our North American value systems into sharp focus, intertwined as they are with our ability to bring about technological advances that create the moral dilemma in the first place.

Forget for a moment the useless argument about whether Terri would want to live in a vegetative state or end a life that can only be sustained by artificial means. The fact is — we don’t know. We don’t know whether she expressed a death wish to her husband. We have only his word for it, and there are some reasons to suspect whether the wish was expressed at all.

He has not been the caring, romantic and heroic figure some would want to cast. He clearly wants out of the relationship that began with his courting and early marriage to a beautiful young woman. Indeed, for the past eight years he has had a relationship with another woman who has borne him two children.

And he has been at odds with Terry Schiavo’s parents for as many years, a family feud that began with his unwillingness to share a cash award with her parents.

They call him an adulterer and a would-be murderer. He accuses them of opportunism and lying.

Messy stuff. Squalid. Nasty.

There seems to be nothing about this entire story that is in any way ennobling,except the pathetic sight of the central figure herself: beyond knowing, beyond caring, beyond the hurtfulness of the grubby circus taking place around her.

For if the motives of the Schindlers and Michael Schiavo are suspect, the motives of the politicians and the media were clear — exploit this agonizing human drama for all it is worth. Not often is such a life and death drama offered up for public entertainment, and they have made the most of it.

Terry Schiavo lay in a vegetative state. As far as medical science could determine, she knew not whether she was alive or dead. Her brain had been to all intents and purposes dead. Her body remained alive, only because of a feeding tube programmed to send nutrients to her body.

The horror of the alternative, of ending it all, is the deliberateness of the planning to take a life, which we in supposedly civilized society are proscribed not to — except, of course where we prescribe the penalty of death in retribution for acts beyond the pale of humanity, or in wars and conflicts judged “just” by our political and religious leaders.

But these same tenets promise us a better life in the afterlife. That being so, what is so wrong in helping God decide when a life should end, if that ending is arranged with love and compassion and if one believes that the afterlife will be preferable to the pain and suffering of this one?

In short — we enter a moral thicket of contradictions when we contemplate the ending of life before a decision is made by fate, circumstance, old age or âe” if you like — God’s will.

Social conservatives believe that each life has an intrinsic value regardless of the physical condition of the host body, be it a fetus, or one severely damaged in its cognitive abilities and judged by the best medical opinion to be beyond recall.

Social liberals believe that quality of life is central to the issue — that a life is not worth being lived when it can no longer draw spiritual sustenance from the act of existence in being a living and breathing body.

There is no straightforward path of moral and ethical guidance down which we can travel.

There is only faith and reason for the individual to draw upon. Why not let Terri live? What harm would it do to anyone to let her live until some disease or bodily failure claims her life?

I am forever haunted by a decision in which I once participated.

The doctors said there were no veins left in my elderly relative in which to insert a tube that would continue to support life after a severe stroke. The veins were collapsing. I agonized over the implicit effect that act would have. I finally concurred that it was time to pull the tube, extremely apprehensive in the uneasy knowledge that my acquiescence was a sentence of death,

Except it wasn’t.

That very day the relative began to eat food spooned to him by his family. He lived, cared for by a loving wife and their children, for a half dozen years more, incapable of speech, and blind as well.

The quality of that life by almost any standard was questionable. The burden upon his elderly wife was considerable. Yet she devoted herself totally, aperfect example of love and caring and dedication and sacrifice. Her values superceded everything else, including the inconvenience of invalidism. Her life became a living embodiment of her values.

Death is one of the two great mysteries of our existence. It does not really matter how it comes, or when. It is inevitable in any case. What does matter, is the way we react to the prospect of the death of others — the good and the profane invoked in us.

And we must ask ourselves — if we truly believe in the sanctity of life and hold to the belief that all lives have equal value, then we must sort through the impact of technology on our spiritual life.

That is a debate worth having, even if it took Terri Schiavo’s personal tragedy to instigate it.

On the day of Terri Schiavo’s death, many thousands also will have left this earthly life around the world, unknown except to those closest to them. She, unknowingly, passes from this life as a North American celebrity, manipulated to that shaky pedestal over a period of a couple of weeks by the venality of modern media and its appetite for the dramatic — a monster aptly fed by equally venal politicians eager to bolster their own reputations with some segments of the public.

The activities and deportment of that dreadful, flagitious and self-serving lot makes its own statement of contempt for the very values they supposedly hold dear.