The decision of Congressional Democrats to hand George Bush a blank check to maintain a war they were elected to end has frustrated a lot of Americans — even the until-now indefatigable Cindy Sheehan.
Sheehan, the mother of slain soldier Casey Sheehan whose 2005 decision to camp out in Crawford, Texas, until George Bush heard her complaints about the war made her a hero to activists around the world, is tired of the compromises that keep the war going. So tired that she is retiring as the “face” of the peace movement.
Here is what Sheehan, one of the most selfless campaigners this reporter has had the privilege of covering, wrote in her online diary upon the dawning of another Memorial Day with no end in sight to a war that should never have started:
I have come to some heartbreaking conclusions this Memorial Day Morning. These are not spur of the moment reflections, but things I have been meditating on for about a year now. The conclusions that I have slowly and very reluctantly come to are very heartbreaking to me.
The first conclusion is that I was the darling of the so-called left as long as I limited my protests to George Bush and the Republican Party. Of course, I was slandered and libeled by the right as a “tool” of the Democratic Party. This label was to marginalize me and my message. How could a woman have an original thought, or be working outside of our “two-party” system?
However, when I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the “left” started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used. I guess no one paid attention to me when I said that the issue of peace and people dying for no reason is not a matter of “right or left”, but “right and wrong.”
I am deemed a radical because I believe that partisan politics should be left to the wayside when hundreds of thousands of people are dying for a war based on lies that is supported by Democrats and Republican alike. It amazes me that people who are sharp on the issues and can zero in like a laser beam on lies, misrepresentations, and political expediency when it comes to one party refuse to recognize it in their own party. Blind party loyalty is dangerous whatever side it occurs on. People of the world look on us Americans as jokes because we allow our political leaders so much murderous latitude and if we don’t find alternatives to this corrupt “two” party system our Representative Republic will die and be replaced with what we are rapidly descending into with nary a check or balance: a fascist corporate wasteland. I am demonized because I don’t see party affiliation or nationality when I look at a person, I see that person’s heart. If someone looks, dresses, acts, talks and votes like a Republican, then why do they deserve support just because he/she calls him/herself a Democrat?
I have also reached the conclusion that if I am doing what I am doing because I am an “attention whore” then I really need to be committed. I have invested everything I have into trying to bring peace with justice to a country that wants neither. If an individual wants both, then normally he/she is not willing to do more than walk in a protest march or sit behind his/her computer criticizing others. I have spent every available cent I got from the money a “grateful” country gave me when they killed my son and every penny that I have received in speaking or book fees since then. I have sacrificed a 29 year marriage and have traveled for extended periods of time away from Casey’s brother and sisters and my health has suffered and my hospital bills from last summer (when I almost died) are in collection because I have used all my energy trying to stop this country from slaughtering innocent human beings. I have been called every despicable name that small minds can think of and have had my life threatened many times.
The most devastating conclusion that I reached this morning, however, was that Casey did indeed die for nothing. His precious lifeblood drained out in a country far away from his family who loves him, killed by his own country which is beholden to and run by a war machine that even controls what we think. I have tried every since he died to make his sacrifice meaningful. Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives. It is so painful to me to know that I bought into this system for so many years and Casey paid the price for that allegiance. I failed my boy and that hurts the most.
I have also tried to work within a peace movement that often puts personal egos above peace and human life. This group won’t work with that group; he won’t attend an event if she is going to be there; and why does Cindy Sheehan get all the attention anyway? It is hard to work for peace when the very movement that is named after it has so many divisions.
Our brave young men and women in Iraq have been abandoned there indefinitely by their cowardly leaders who move them around like pawns on a chessboard of destruction and the people of Iraq have been doomed to death and fates worse than death by people worried more about elections than people. However, in five, ten, or fifteen years, our troops will come limping home in another abject defeat and ten or twenty years from then, our children’s children will be seeing their loved ones die for no reason, because their grandparents also bought into this corrupt system. George Bush will never be impeached because if the Democrats dig too deeply, they may unearth a few skeletons in their own graves and the system will perpetuate itself in perpetuity.
I am going to take whatever I have left and go home. I am going to go home and be a mother to my surviving children and try to regain some of what I have lost. I will try to maintain and nurture some very positive relationships that I have found in the journey that I was forced into when Casey died and try to repair some of the ones that have fallen apart since I began this single-minded crusade to try and change a paradigm that is now, I am afraid, carved in immovable, unbendable and rigidly mendacious marble.
Camp Casey has served its purpose. It’s for sale. Anyone want to buy five beautiful acres in Crawford , Texas ? I will consider any reasonable offer. I hear George Bush will be moving out soon, too…which makes the property even more valuable.
This is my resignation letter as the “face” of the American anti-war movement. This is not my “Checkers” moment, because I will never give up trying to help people in the world who are harmed by the empire of the good old US of A, but I am finished working in, or outside of this system. This system forcefully resists being helped and eats up the people who try to help it. I am getting out before it totally consumes me or anymore people that I love and the rest of my resources.
Good-bye America …you are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can’t make you be that country unless you want it.
It’s up to you now.
John Nichols’ new book is The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders’ Cure for Royalism. Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson hails it as a “nervy, acerbic, passionately argued history-cum-polemic [that] combines a rich examination of the parliamentary roots and past use of the ‘heroic medicine’ that is impeachment with a call for Democratic leaders to ‘reclaim and reuse the most vital tool handed to us by the founders for the defense of our most basic liberties.’”
Copyright © 2007 The Nation
cindy s. in a way reminds me of mlk jr. as the nytimes said, he was a “credit to his race” when struggling for civil rights, but as soon as he started taking on the war machine and thus the democrats…well, we all know what happened to him.
i saw her about 3 years ago at a rally in d.c. and she already looked absolutely exhausted.
she’s a reminder of the cost of real dissent in this country. and what the democrats are really all about.
Man Jedediah, don’t give us that “what the Democrats are really all about” crap. Nobody’s screwed this country like the Democrats have by not being a worthy opposition to the insanities and idiocracies of the religious far-right. I hate the Democratic Party worse than the Republican one, despite my progressive persona. Cowards, fools, talkers. Don’t dirty Cindy Sheahan with your plastic rhetoric. The Democrats are every bit as responsible for this war as Caligula Cheney himself because they did nothing to stop it. A thousand good deeds can’t atone for one murder!
rbisbane 1984, second time I’ve seen your same blog. Well here goes for my limited knowledge. I remember Cindy saying how she tried to talk Casy out of of military. Casey was Not in Iraq very long before he died there, as the family didn’t even have his address. DemocracyNow covered this last part today. Perhaps you would be better placing this type of inquiry to someone who lost their family member for working for Blackwater.
In response, to rbrisbane_1984, I do not think that soldiers are aspiring to be “contract killers”. Labelling of any large group is not very effective. The celebration of the military is a deeply engrained part of our culture that begins being forced into our heads when we are very young. I can remember putting yellow ribbons around trees at our elementary school when I was only 7. Every year we had a school performance honoring the military. We sang that country song about how our soldiers have made us free. No teacher ever asked us if soldiers fighting in Iraq, Vietnam, Korea etc. had, in fact, made us freer. It was just fact that was not questioned. When I switched to Catholic school, I realized that religion served the same purpose nationalism served in public schools. Moreover, WWII is still too recent in our history for people to admit that our military is no longer used in our own defense.
Blaming recruits for the fact that they are being used for unjust ends places the blame on the wrong people. Most recruits are young and probably sometimes still naive. They are only doing what they have been told, repeatedly, is the right thing to do since childhood. Soldiers often enlist for financial or educational opportunities. They are aspiring to become college graduates not contract killers. Combine this with the spin our media put on the Iraq war and our failure as a nation to face our past military misadventures and it is no small wonder that young people have been easy targets for recruitment.
rbrisbane - same comments from me as posted in the other article - you are not a judge and jury - the sensible first half of your post is diminished by your rant at the end
I didn’t intend to play judge or jury, just a commentator like each of you here. And mine was not a rant at the end but a set of legitimate questions. Ehren Watada would understand them, he was the First Lieutenant in the United States Army who refused to deploy to Iraq for he believed the war to be illegal and that it would make him party to war crimes. I wished the rest of the military followed his example. Watada’s courage was the same displayed by Muhammad Ali back in 60s and 70s.
Fighting in an illegal war as a soldier makes you a war criminal according to international laws. Period. The fact that “the celebration of the military is a deeply engrained (sic) part of our culture that begins being forced into our heads when we are very young” doesn’t change international laws. I’m well aware of the brainwashing going on, I also watch TV, I see at least one armed forces commercial trying to recruit young men every hour or so. Recruiting techniques are among the most deceiving and dishonest tools used by governments to gather men to fight their wars. Selling the military as ‘noble’ is part of these techniques.
rbrisbane - I understand your reasoning but I disagree that it can be applied ‘blanket-style’, otherwise I would have to tar with the same brush every employee of every agency that is part of the war effort. Should every civil servant in Defense, Homeland Security, etc who has a conscience resign? IMHO, your sentiments are noble but too simplistically applied.
oluk, it’s not a matter of reasoning or sentiment, it’s a matter of the rule of law. In the case of the current war, the law must indeed be applied ‘blanket-style’ to all troops on the ground in Iraq up to the commander-in-chief. I’m not sure about civil servants working for Defense Dept. or Homeland Security and their complicity according to international laws. But troops are definitely illegal invaders, including the ones killed, without them Bush wouldn’t have been able to accomplish this monstrous crime. First Lieutenant Ehren Watada saw it this way and quit. Others should have followed his example. All soldiers in an illegal invasion are war criminals in the eyes of the international law. Read the principles of the
Nuremberg Tribunal, 1950: http://deoxy.org/wc/wc-nurem.htm
There was a blind fury of strident nationalism that drove many young men to the recuiters after the generals and media brayed the terrorism alert. Even now, there are some who still pull out the same tired talking points despite the reality–claiming everything changed in a “post 911 world”. How come nothing changed after Oklahoma City–something that has receded into the background which involved a disturbed veteran of the Gulf War.
My sister-in-law got caught up in that fervor and when her son joined up she put the photo of him taken in uniform, on the television. There was no reasoning with people caught up in the moment at that time, and believe me, my mother tried. The kid was never the same–he is like a ghost and there is now a rift between mother and son.
I think what drives Cindy is that she failed to dissuade her son–even if no matter what she did, short of binding him to a chair and locking him in a room, would’ve stopped him. It eats away at her heart that she didn’t do more–no matter how much she did–it was never enough, when the entire country was banging the war drums.
So, it is unfair to pass judgement within the context of how the situation is perceived today, compared to when all those boys were lining up to fight for their country. My father did the same thing when he joined up to fight in Korea–and he learned about the horror of war and fought war for the rest of his life. Casey never had that chance, but Cindy did, and she learned, and still learns, and still leads with what she learns, so lighten up, rbrisbane, she would be the first to tell you that the burden is still with her.
Vern, blind nationalism must be addressed and eliminated, not used as an excuse or explanation for committing war crimes, as you are doing here. And this is no time to lighten up. This is time to be brave and take action like First Lieutenant Ehren Watada. Innocent people are being murdered every day. It’s not only Bush’s war, it’s the troops’ too.
Well true, rbrisbane, but that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a contributing factor among many. Hopefully more people are gaining awareness, but it is frightening how that mythology can be so cynically manipulated in leading people down that road. Takes some time for people to reach the “aha” moment and tip the scales to critical mass. In the beginning there are few lone and persecuted voices in the wilderness and even then there will be discord and ego conflict among groups working towards the same goals. Human condition, I’m afraid.
Cindy Sheehan needs to be seen for what she is: an intent, but frail, canary. She has been drawn down into the mines within America where new meanings are forged onto old visages, where compacts are shredded and values burned in sulpherous flames.
The atmosphere there is covert and toxic, but it is rising up around us more rapidly each day. Too many of our citizenry are either too complacent with their worldly goods, too enamored with the trappings of power - having it or knowing someone that has it - , or too burned out from having too little to long despite the too many words about how swell everything is to notice the increasing density of noxious fumes engulfing us.
We need to look scrupulously at the waning of Ms. Sheehan’s commitment and activism. She is collapsing, heart and soul, from something that has us all in harm’s way.
Hopefully she is demonstrating the good sense of flying away, saving herself from both a covertly reconstructed America and the indifference that let her stand alone until, at least, she recognised that continued passivity in the face of utterly corrupt leadership and representation will in all likelihood poison to death all that once made us proud to be Americans.
If we are serious about what we are to mean to one another as fellow citizens with a common, decent social contract, we’d better stop watching the canaries wane and die and forcefully bring government out into the light and make it ethical, representative, and fully accountable to a standard, agreed upon, set of common values, values that reinvest being American with genuine, hard-earned pride.
Thank you, Ms. Sheehan. If you find it pejorative to be called an “American,” then be proud of what you have done as a caring human being who has amply shown that you value “each” life and are willing to confront those who lamely justify war.
Peter M. Stocks
Riverside, CA
There is a lot of cruel un-empathetic armchair psycho-anal babel going on her…
It’s seems the bulk of you commenters are political for identity’s sake.
A mere name brand.
hollow
I wear izod—which means __________ about me.
self absorbed.
the others outside of your bubble is only relevent as to how it pertains to your polo jeans.
shallow.
meaningless
useless.
nice identity.