Saluting Cindy Sheehan

More than any person in America, Cindy Sheehan galvanized the peace movement. As a mother who lost her son Casey to the war and would not remain silent, she enabled millions of Americans to see this hideous war for what it was.

Along the way, she’s been called every ugly name on the Net, which seems to traffic in misogynistic crudities and computer screen snipers.

Rightwing talk show host Phil Hendrie called her an “ignorant cow.”

People on the freerepublic.com site called her a “traitor,” and an “insane, psychopathic bitch.”

On another site, she was called a “seditious cunt.”

Others mocked her grief, with one saying: “Just shit out another kid to take Casey’s place.”

(Her resignation was greeted with more of the same on the freerepublic.com site. One person called her “Momma Wacko,” and another wrote, “I hope the b**** gets hit by a bus.”)

Through it all, Cindy Sheehan maintained her dignity, her clear head, her courage, and her passion.

Never one to play the political game, she attacked Democrats who fronted for this war, and she threw herself into the effort to impeach Bush and Cheney.

Now she’s calling it quits, at least for a while.

On Memorial Day, she submitted what she called her “ ‘resignation letter’ as the ‘face’ of the American anti-war movement.”

When she dared to criticize Democrats, she wrote, she started to get the “same slurs that the right used,” only this time from the left, by which she means the compromisers and capitulators and their apologists within the Democratic Party.

She said she’s tired of the in-fighting within the peace movement, disgusted, understandably, with the Democrats, and thoroughly dejected about the possibility of ending this war and rescuing this country.

“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. And she added: “George Bush will never be impeached.”

She has sacrificed immensely to try to end this war. She lost her son, her marriage of 29 years fell apart, and she has endured more slings and arrows than anyone ever deserved.

Now she wants to spend more time with her surviving children, and who can blame her for that?

“I am going to take whatever I have left and go home,” she wrote. “I am going to go home and be a mother to my surviving children and try to regain 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.”

I’m not as despairing as Cindy Sheehan is. Howard Zinn teaches us that even the seemingly most immovable systems can crumble at surprising moments, if we keep pushing. But I certainly understand how Cindy Sheehan could arrive at her conclusion. And I can sense the exhaustion in her letter.

“I have spent every available cent . . . [and] have used all my energy trying to stop this country from slaughtering innocent human beings,” she wrote, concluding a little later: “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 any more people that I love and the rest of my resources.”

Cindy Sheehan is burned out. Not many people could have kept going at that speed. Maybe Ralph Nader could have. Maybe Amy Goodman could have. But that may be it.

The rest of us need our down time, diversions, balance, and hobbies. To be “single-minded,” as Cindy Sheehan herself found out, is unsustainable for most mortals.

So I’m glad, for her sake, that Cindy Sheehan is going home to regroup and recupe.

But I’m saddened for the peace movement, and for the country.

Yet I don’t think we’ve seen the last of Cindy Sheehan. I certainly hope not. She’s an extraordinarily decent, selfless, and courageous person.

“This is not my ‘Checkers’ moment,” she writes, “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.”

We all owe Cindy Sheehan a huge debt of gratitude for all that she has contributed.

I wish her happiness and comfort and relaxation and love and laughter in her days ahead.

And I look forward to joining hands with her again somewhere down the road.