To know that your child died not only for no real cause, but that the country he died for doesn't really care...Yes, I think the only mystery is not that Cindy Sheehan is done with public anti-war activism, but that she hung in there for so long. I hope that she can regain her health and some semblance of a private life.Thank you for all you have done, Cindy.
Update 6/1: Molly Ivors at Whiskey Fire :
[snip]My point is that when Sheehan came forward as a public face, in 2005, that kind of raw emotion, her loss, was the most potent weapon we had available to us as anti-war activists, and we embraced her accordingly. She was doing something to fill the void left by her son's death, and she was an essential, a potent symbol, of the cost of the war on real lives.
Our opposition, however, must be based on broader principles than the grief of one mother. I realized how far we had moved this spring, when Mary and Kevin Tillman testified before Congress about the cover-up and propaganda campaign surrounding the death of Patrick Tillman. It struck me then that Sheehan seemed to be demanding a personal justice she was never going to get from the sociopath inhabiting the White House, who has been content to watch others die for his ideology for going on 40 years. But the Tillmans went at it somewhat differently, collecting information and reports from all over in order to expose the "fraud... deliberate and calculated lies" which followed hard upon Patrick's death.
And so I wish Cindy Sheehan peace, not Kristinn Taylor's "suck it up" peace, but the peace of knowing that she did an incredible amount to change the conversation in this country and made it possible for us to move to another level of critique. Thank you.Exactly. Cindy Sheehan threw a wrench into the war propaganda machine, personalized the dead soldiers, ripped off the shuttered faces to show the pain. The Tillmans couldn't have been heard if Sheehan hadn't been there first.
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