Cindy Sheehan: The Mother of Us All
It certainly wasn’t Rep. John Murtha’s (D-PA) nonetheless startling reversal on the Iraqi War that turned the tide for the peace movement. Nor was it the irritating Jenny-Come-Lately claims of leadership for the peace movement by Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who sat like the Mugwump she is for the last three years and said nothing about Iraq.
Rather, it was a Gold Star Mother—a grieving mother from Vacaville turned activist—who re-energized the peace movement. And with only one question: “Why? Why did my son Casey die?”
Casey Sheehan enlisted and died only five days into his tour of duty in Iraq. “Why?” is the great question which has received no answer from the man Michael Moore calls “the squatter in the White House,” an international war criminal who has violated the constitution more times than even Nixon ever thought of—and gotten away with it.
“Why?” is the question Cindy Sheehan asked when she set up Camp Casey last year near W’s ranch in Texas. She continues to ask it now, having authored Not One Mother’s Child (Koa Books, Maui, Hawaii and Sante Fe, New Mexico), and gone on tour with it while spearheading Camp Caseys everywhere.
At A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books in San Francisco, on Jan. 7, she read an excerpt from it, then spent over two hours answering the questions of her audience.
Her introduction recognized her campaign as “a remarkable act of courage and rage in the face of unimaginable loss,” and rightly so.
In 35 years of interviewing people and covering stories, I have never met anyone quite like Cindy Sheehan. She has a power and a presence that transcends her loss. It’s as if she’s adopted the rest of the troops in Iraq.
I won’t call her a saint—Dorothy Day, who founded the Catholic Workers, warned us against that—but I will call her an exceptional, as the Native Americans used to say, Human Being.
Her irresistible smile reminded me of two people—a woman I knew who was ecstatically in love and beamed that to everyone, and Patti Smith, who I’ve met and interviewed twice. Smith once sang “People Have The Power.” Here’s what Cindy Sheehan said.
Just into the city on the red eye express from Hawaii where she was “bored out of her wits” (on vacation), she’s made a speech to 1,000 people the night before, had two hours sleep, then kept her appointment in San Francisco right on schedule.
She read an excerpt from her book on “the peaceful occupation of Crawford, Texas, Day 15 at Camp Casey” then took questions.
What does she want to say to Bush?
“I want to say: ‘Duh’!” she responded, then addressed charges of her use of profanity.
“If you support this war,” she told her critics, “then get your ass over to Iraq and take someone’s place or oppose this war.”
She continued, “Contrary to what the mainstream media thinks, I did not fall off the pumpkin truck in Crawford. I’ve spoken to Congress. I’ve stood up and said ‘my son died for nothing. He died for lies. George Bush lied to us and he knew he was lying. George made us afraid of ghosts who aren’t there.’”
Never relenting, never blowing retreat, Cindy went on:
“You (Bush) say you have to complete the mission when you don’t even know what the mission is! Bush and his advisors seriously underestimated me and all mothers who want to make sense of their children’s deaths. Get used to it George, we’re not going away!”
On other politicians:
“(Nancy) Pelosi needs to get off her butt… and you should build a Camp Casey in front of (Dianne) Feinstein’s house. Those people are despicable.”
She hasn’t spoken with John Murtha, who reversed his course and came out against the war, but cautions that “Murtha pushes for redeployment while we want to remove all of our military presence. We want our kids home!”
On the impeachment movement:
“I’m not calling for impeachment; I’m calling for the eviction movement. George, get out, your tenancy is over.”
She prefers the term peace movement over anti-war movement because “when the Vietnam War ended, the anti-war movement ended. My goal is to make sure it never happens again.”
“Friends don’t let friends commit war crimes,” she said. “We’re all part of humanity. The world is so small and we’re in it together. I’m against killing, but then everybody should be against killing.
“No one should join the military when they make money off death. The peace movement should work against recruitment. Casey was recruited and lied to. He wanted to be a chaplain’s assistant. The recruiter lied to him and told him he’d only be in Iraq in a supporting role, but he was killed only five days after he got into combat.”
Cindy has taken the “peaceful occupation of Crawford, Texas,” nationwide, even worldwide.
“I spend a lot of time in Crawford, Texas,” she closed. “It’s my vacation home now too.”
And she continues to speak truth to power with one simple question that hasn’t yet been answered:
“Why?”
Gary
