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Monday, March 20, 2006

Cindy Sheehan

This feature article on Cindy Sheehan has some interesting observations: Cindy Sheehan's year of living famously by Vicki Haddock San Francisco Chronicle 03/19/06.

One is its brief but decent discussion of "survivor missions" that help people to cope with the loss of a loved one:

"When a child dies before a parent, it throws all of our assumptions about the world into chaos," explains Brian de Vries, professor of gerontology at San Francisco State. "Our children are our own 'immortality projects,' our legacies, our way to make the world better. When some people are robbed of that, they desperately look for another way to better the world."

So rather than retreating into a cloistered hell, these extraordinary parents channel their agony into very public battles. Candy Lightner responded to her teenage daughter's death in a traffic accident by founding MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving). Marc Klaas reacted to his daughter Polly's kidnapping and murder by championing tougher sentencing. It's not unusual for such parents to grow alienated from other loved ones grieving differently, nor is it unusual for their motives to be maligned.

The following is also an interesting biographical tidbit.

It has to do with her sudden and unexpected fame and the effect it's had on her family:

As to Cindy Sheehan's motives, it seems almost everyone has their mind made up -- inspiring hero or shameless exploiter - based solely on her media facsimile. When her daughter Carly, a UC Davis student, began a bartending job, she was taken aback when regulars started trashing her mom.

"I think somebody needs to be out there doing what she's doing to stop the war," Carly says now. "But there are days, you know, when I just want my mom."

Still, they talk by phone daily, and Carly agrees with her mom's observation that her children have grown up in her recent absence. Few can understand what it's like for them. One day actress Jane Fonda, whose anti-war actions during Vietnam have haunted her show-biz career, flew the Sheehan girls to New York for lunch with someone who could understand: her daughter.

But right in the middle of the article, we get this kind of ditzy, Republican-twit thought:

Is there not some irony in peace activism that demonizes political opponents - the sort of lingua franca that, when practiced by governments, leads to wars?

This follows an observation that Sheehan has referred to some parents as being "brainwashed" who have also lost children in Iraq but who criticized her for her position on the war.

Oh, Liberals are big old hyprocrites! It's such a stock part of the conservative faith these days it would be easy to miss noticing it.

It reminds me of one the stock bits from Ronald Reagan's stump speeches in the 1960s when he liked to refer to an apocraphal antiwar demonstrator hitting someone over the head with a peace sign.

What kind of value system is it that could equate someone referring to their critics as "brainwashed" with starting a disastrous war based on phony claims about non-existent WMDs? Shoot, I'm used to hearing people of all political persuasions talking about their opponents in terms that would make "brainwashed" sound almost like a compliment!

posted at 1:16:00 PM by Bruce Miller

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