Sad But True

I thought Cindy Sheehan's initial appearance on the public scene, instituting a truly grass-roots protest outside the tumbleweed ranch, was a wonderful thing. Here was an idealistic and (more importantly) effective sustained exercise in free speech, and Mister Man had no idea what to do about any of it. Loading up the darkened Suburbans to go next door for a fundraiser was probably the most effective free advertisement Sheehan could have hoped for, because it showed Bush for what he is at heart -- an indifferent patrician pretending to be a cowboy, a person hopelessly out of his depth except when he's glad-handing people for thick envelopes.

But that was then. I thought Sheehan had perhaps diluted her message somewhat by rolling with the likes of Hugo Chàvez. There is a subtle but distinct difference between being amused by Chàvez' buffoonish tweaking of Bush's nose, and standing on stage with him as he rails against American policies in general. Even if we tend to agree with essential points, there are better ways to make these points, though certainly not in the American arena of political discourse. So I have some sympathy for her, but I wish she had stuck to the roots of her message, instead of allowing opportunists to co-opt her as some sort of ideological totem.

And it's especially hard not to sympathize with her as she walks away from it all.

Sheehan criticized "blind party loyalty" as a danger, no matter which side it involved, and said the current two-party system is "corrupt" and "rapidly descending into with nary a check or balance: a fascist corporate wasteland."

Sheehan said she had sacrificed a 29-year marriage and endured threats to put all her energy into stopping the war. What she found, she wrote, was a movement "that often puts personal egos above peace and human life."

But she said the most devastating conclusion she had reached "was that Casey did indeed die for nothing ... killed by his own country which is beholden to and run by a war machine that even controls what we think".

"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," she wrote. 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."

She has a point. She sacrificed her son, her marriage, and probably her sense of well-being for a country that worships frivolous narcissism. Sheehan says "it's up to you now", but it was always at least notionally up to us. All that was ever required to prevent what's been happening is for enough people to quit abdicating their responsibility to stay informed and pay attention.