Farewell

(Cross-posted to The Core 4.)

I'm sure you have all seen this.

I have endured a lot of smear and hatred since Casey was killed and especially since I became the so-called "Face" of the American anti-war movement. Especially since I renounced any tie I have remaining with the Democratic Party, I have been further trashed.... Being called an "attention whore" and being told "good riddance" are some of the more milder rebukes. ...

I was the darling of the so-called left as long as I limited my protests to George Bush and the Republican Party. Of course, I was slandered and libeled by the right as a "tool" of the Democratic Party. ...

However, when I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the "left" started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used. I guess no one paid attention to me when I said that the issue of peace and people dying for no reason is not a matter of "right or left", but "right and wrong."

Some of us did, Cindy. And some of us saw this coming. Back on January 14, I wrote this:

Ten days ago, Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel was holding a press conference announcing a Democratic measure intended to place a couple of largely meaningless but good-sounding restrictions on lobbyists. Cindy Sheehan and a group of fellow protesters disrupted the event with signs and chants calling for an end to the Iraq War - and she was roundly denounced for it by a variety of people who were more than willing to cheer her on when her target was Bush instead of Democrats. She was called “stupid, unthinking and politically naive” for staging a “circus.” She is “a fool,” we were assured, who is “against everyone but her own rabid fans” and whose “pompous spectacle,” backed by her “yappy, worshipping, poodle cult," was an "inept outburst" marked by "self-important impatience" and "shrill posturing." She was told to "shut up" and to "put a sock in it." ...

My first reaction was to say just who the flaming hell do you people think you are? Who among you has done a fraction of what Cindy Sheehan has, committed a fraction of the time or energy, either physical or emotional, to stopping this madness? What is she, just a tool, a convenience, to be discarded now that you've got what you want? "Hey, Democrats won the election. So shut up."

And then my second reaction set in: Yes, that's exactly what she is to you. Just a living press release, just another campaign commercial, a campaign that for you is now ended. For you, for way too many among us, including way too many of the so-called "liberal" or "progressive" bloggers, support for Cindy Sheehan or any other protesters was never actually about the war. It was about electing Democrats.

So now she needs to call it quits. Contrary to the expected post hoc vituperation and the milder opinions, I did not find her farewell "less than gracious," as one put it. I found it spot on. And I did not find it, as others did, bitter. Rather I found it an expression of pain born of a legitimate sense of betrayal by people she thought were friends and supporters - and who damn well should have been.

Interestingly, Sheehan writes that

I am deemed a radical because I believe that partisan politics should be left to the wayside when hundreds of thousands of people are dying for a war based on lies that is supported by Democrats and Republican alike.

But she also sees the US becoming "a fascist corporate wasteland" with a society "beholden to and run by a war machine that even controls what we think," adding "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."

Cindy Sheehan, you are a radical, an honorable title to be worn proudly. Just like some of us were during Vietnam, you have been radicalized by the war, by the senseless, monstrous waste of it all. The scales have fallen from your eyes and you no longer "see through a glass darkly." You've seen truth, and know that Iraq can't be separated from the rest of US foreign and military policy, something to which those who condemned your visit to Venezuela still blind themselves, nor can those policies abroad be separated from those at home.

I know you said this:

Good-bye America ...you are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can’t make you be that country unless you want it.

It’s up to you now.

But truth be told, I'm confident that after a rest you will be back. Likely in a quiet way, not out front, maybe even just on local matters, but you'll be back. Because you have been radicalized by reality. And from that, there is no turning back.

But for now, go in peace, Cindy, with gratitude (and admiration) for the stamina and courage you showed.