Cindy Sheehan ‘quits’

In journalism, that’s a terrible headline to choose for an article – mainly because most of my local audience would not recognize that name. But I’m not a journalist – at least not on this blog. And that name deserves to be remembered. Hers is a name surrounded with controversy, and of course, it is impossible to know a person from such a great distance, only reading of her exploits from websites from all the way across the world. What I do know, is that for the price she paid (the loss of her son), and the price she chose to pay (character assassination, financial and health burdens, divorce) when she became known as the ‘Peace Mom’ and the ‘face’ of the anti-war movement in the United States, her voice deserves to be listened to, for she speaks with a moral authority very few of us have.

Background : She camped for a month outside George Bush’s residence, which first attracted a lot of media attention to her. I’ve always been wondering why Michael Moore didn’t get her for Fahrenheit 9/11. Anyways her details are on Wikipedia.

She quit her efforts today, and wrote this open letter to her nation. A lot of people can write and talk about a lot of things, but if you want to hear the perspective of a woman who have walked the talk in every sense of the cliché, read that letter. (Excerpts I felt was most profound after the cut.) Cindy, take heart. You may be leaving the anti-war movement in America, but you’ve given it enough momentum to move by itself. The end of the war appears to be in sight.

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.”

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.

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

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

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.

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