A broken country and a mother's broken heart

Republicans hate Cindy Sheehan.

Now, Democrats hate Cindy Sheehan, too.

Republicans mock, smear and berate Cindy Sheehan.

Now, so do Democrats.

Short of some whacked-out ideologue hunting her down like a varmint and blowing her brains out, is there anything more this broken, polarized nation can take from Cindy Sheehan? Her son, Casey, is dead -- killed in George Bush's calamitous Seinfeldian (a war about nothing) misadventure in Iraq. Her heart is broken. Her marriage is gone.

AND NOW her ultimately quixotic campaign to stop our involvement in an unjust and unwinnable Middle Eastern war has cost Cindy Sheehan her faith in American democracy and any hope for our political future.

I have come to some heartbreaking conclusions this Memorial Day Morning. These are not spur of the moment reflections, but things I have been meditating on for about a year now. The conclusions that I have slowly and very reluctantly come to are very heartbreaking to me.

The first conclusion is that 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. This label was to marginalize me and my message. How could a woman have an original thought, or be working outside of our "two-party" system?

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."

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. It amazes me that people who are sharp on the issues and can zero in like a laser beam on lies, misrepresentations, and political expediency when it comes to one party refuse to recognize it in their own party. Blind party loyalty is dangerous whatever side it occurs on. People of the world look on us Americans as jokes because we allow our political leaders so much murderous latitude and if we don’t find alternatives to this corrupt "two" party system our Representative Republic will die and be replaced with what we are rapidly descending into with nary a check or balance: a fascist corporate wasteland. I am demonized because I don’t see party affiliation or nationality when I look at a person, I see that person’s heart. If someone looks, dresses, acts, talks and votes like a Republican, then why do they deserve support just because he/she calls him/herself a Democrat?

I have also reached the conclusion that if I am doing what I am doing because I am an "attention whore" then I really need to be committed. I have invested everything I have into trying to bring peace with justice to a country that wants neither. If an individual wants both, then normally he/she is not willing to do more than walk in a protest march or sit behind his/her computer criticizing others. I have spent every available cent I got from the money a "grateful" country gave me when they killed my son and every penny that I have received in speaking or book fees since then. I have sacrificed a 29 year marriage and have traveled for extended periods of time away from Casey’s brother and sisters and my health has suffered and my hospital bills from last summer (when I almost died) are in collection because I have used all my energy trying to stop this country from slaughtering innocent human beings. I have been called every despicable name that small minds can think of and have had my life threatened many times.

The most devastating conclusion that I reached this morning, however, was that Casey did indeed die for nothing. His precious lifeblood drained out in a country far away from his family who loves him, killed by his own country which is beholden to and run by a war machine that even controls what we think. I have tried every since he died to make his sacrifice meaningful. 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. 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.

A SANE, compassionate and just nation -- whether its inhabitants agreed or disagreed with Mrs. Sheehan -- would offer its gratitude for the sacrifice of her son. It would offer her its condolences and its compassion. It would offer her a forum where reasoned, and reasonable, debate might flourish and principled politics predominate.

It would offer its prayers on her behalf . . . and for the repose of her beloved son.

Instead, it has given a grieving mother -- a fellow citizen doing what she thought best as best she could -- the back of its hand. This is a country completely unworthy of Casey Sheehan's sacrifice -- the sacrifices of all 3,455 Casey Sheehans in this damned war -- on its behalf.

LISTEN, I THINK Cindy Sheehan was used by the Democrats and the antiwar movement. I think she was used by President Bush's Praetorian Guard as well, as a useful scapegoat and straw woman.

And now, it appears, she agrees with me on that.

But for all Mrs. Sheehan's missteps and sometimes loopy-sounding rhetoric, and despite all the ways she was a "useful dupe" for this benighted nation's unsavory political entities -- of which there are, God help us, no shortage -- she got the Big Picture exactly right. It is my sad opinion that Cindy Sheehan has the number of this country, its sick institutions and its self-centered populace.

Big time.

"Fascist corporate wasteland." I think that's a pretty damn good description of George Bush's America. And then there's this:

Our brave young men and women in Iraq have been abandoned there indefinitely by their cowardly leaders who move them around like pawns on a chessboard of destruction and the people of Iraq have been doomed to death and fates worse than death by people worried more about elections than people. However, in five, ten, or fifteen years, our troops will come limping home in another abject defeat and ten or twenty years from then, our children’s children will be seeing their loved ones die for no reason, because their grandparents also bought into this corrupt system. George Bush will never be impeached because if the Democrats dig too deeply, they may unearth a few skeletons in their own graves and the system will perpetuate itself in perpetuity.

NOW, IT'S STILL a relatively free country, and you are perfectly free to think Cindy Sheehan, and the Mighty Favog, are nuts. Wack. Fruit Loops. Looney Tunes.

A taco shy of a combination plate.

You likewise are free to believe the Administration's recycled Vietnam-era "Domino Theory" rhetoric that if the United States doesn't prevail in Iraq, al Qaida warriors and every other nutbag jihadi in the Islamic world will be streaming across our borders to turn a city a week into another Hiroshima. But if you do, then ask why our southern border is to controlled access what fishnet stockings are to water-balloon technology.

And then let me know whether that makes Bush & Co., the highest-ranking traitors since Benedict Arnold, or merely actionably incompetent.