Cindy Sheehan is still out in Crawford, TX picketing outside the president’s vacation home along with other protesters and counter-protesters. As George cycles and clears bush, she stands at the side of the road angry, determined, and maybe a little bit crazy. (She is also blogging at Huffington Post.)
This Page One issue demonstrates the political and moral weight that a grieving mother possesses. This power has surprised some pundits, and they have lashed out in unbecoming ways.
Mothers have always born the weight of grief in war, though they are given no monuments or parades. Sheehan reminds us of their quiet strength, by not being quiet for perhaps the first time in American history.
Not only does she remind us of all the women, past and present, who have had to bury their kids, but she also reminds us that some mothers, like Sheehan, are paying a higher cost than the rest of us in this war. The rest of us have no loved ones in this war. There are no rations, no tightening of belt buckles. Other than a penny more at the gas tank, the war has no impact on our lives.
Sheehan reminds of us of the uneven sacrifices, albeit in a somewhat hysterical way, but she’s grieving, so cut her some slack. She says,
And I want to ask him: “If it’s such a noble cause, have you asked your daughters to enlist? Have you encouraged them to go take the place of soldiers who are on their third tour of duty?” …The people who send our young, honorable, brave soldiers to die in this war, have no skin in the game. They don’t have any loved ones in harm’s way.
She’s hijacked the president’s vacation. At this point, he can’t go out and talk to her, because all sorts of unhappy Americans would then demand access. If he has the Secret Service haul her away, MAJOR image damage. Of course, he should have been more respectful weeks ago, but that ship has sailed. What he should probably do is send out Laura to talk with her as a fellow mother, end his vacation, and starting thinking about a Plan B.
Apt. 11d 
and she also says, “‘Casey was killed in the global war of terrorism waged on the world and its own citizen by the biggest terrorist outfit in the world, George and his destructive neocon cabal.’ and ‘Thank God for the Internet, or we wouldn’t know anything, and we would already be a fascist state.’ and
‘the mainstream media is a propaganda tool for the government.'”
I got these quotes out of http://www.thehill.com/thehill/export/TheHill/Comment/ByronYork/081705.html
I think Sheehan has taken it to a point where the Moore-Kucinich wing of the Dems will support her and others will pretty much filter her out. She looks increasingly unhinged to me. I’d be unhinged if my kids had been killed, too, but that’s not how you make national policy, good or bad.
It has made the White House strategy of bringing 200 press people to Crawford and making them bake for a month as a way to control the news which gets written work less well.
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Oh come now…does she really want people as stupid as the Bush twins carrying guns? I mean, it’s bad enough that they let GWB fly an air plane…
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After WWI Käthe Kollwitz, a German mother who had lost a son in the war, put up several sculptures in cemetaries. For example this pair, called Mourning Parents, at her son’s grave.
http://www.paulcornelissen.nl/Mourning-Parents.htm
In Kollwitz’s case, she did indeed erect monuments to grieving parents. (Her “Mother with Dead Son (Pieta)” is prominently placed in Berlin.) She was considered a major problem for the Nazis, who famously described her work by saying, “This is not how a German mother looks, thank god.”
None of this stuff is new: not war, not mothers against war, not our national proclivity for only sending poor people to war. (Anyone remember the Civil War Draft Riots?)
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“This Page One issue demonstrates the political and moral weight that a grieving mother possesses. This power has surprised some pundits, and they have lashed out in unbecoming ways.”
And where does this power come from? Her son’s life was not hers to give up or to sacrifice. How does she get special moral authority because someone else made the ultimate sacrifice? Even if that someone else used to be in her care?
We have an age of majority for a reason. Her work as a mother was already completed before he enlisted. Her grief is real, but it is shared by all the people in his life and all the people in the lives of those who are not coming back, and there is no good reason to single out the retired mothers among them and grant them extra weight in our discourse or our respect.
“Mothers have always born the weight of grief in war, though they are given no monuments or parades. ”
And fathers and wives and siblings and children. And of course the soldiers themselves bore a much, much heavier weight.
Which exempts none of them from criticism, rebuke, or even ridicule when they make public statements or become public figures. Why should retired mothers be any different?
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No one is arguing that mothers are exempt from criticism. However, I believe our society in general recognizes the depth of a relationship that typically begins at birth and often involves constant care for the first 18 years.
Ken, do you really believe parents “retire”? Is your mother done being your mother when you move out of the house? If it’s no loss to the parents, then why won’t Bush send his own kids? Why are parents actively working to keep their kids from joining up?
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Don’t know if you recall, but the momentum that led to Israel pulling out of Lebanon was triggered by the organization “Four Mothers.”
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“If it’s no loss to the parents, then why won’t Bush send his own kids?”
Because he can’t.
“Why are parents actively working to keep their kids from joining up? ”
Lots of reasons. Some of them think the war is a bad idea. Some of them think that their grown children are still babies, or wish they were. Some of them just don’t like the military and what it stands for.
And some let their own concern for the safety of their loved ones override every other consideration, including the furtherance of causes that those loved ones believe in.
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She’s had time with the president, why should she get more? Why her more than anyone else? What about being bereaved grants special status, better insight, more worthy judgment? Seems to me it makes you more biased, more emotionally driven, less clearheaded and objective.
I don’t criticize her grieving process: let her camp out where she wills, so long as it’s not on private property; let her try to influence public opinion. But those on the left who have taken up her cause as if this, finally, must be the thing that shames the president into admitting his wrongdoing; that surely he will be driven to compassion, or at least embarrassed into it, by this one grieving mother out of all of the grieving mothers; that, if nothing else, we can use this to beat him about the head and shoulders with, since if he won’t be moved by this then he’s not human; these are cheap manipulators and users.
After all, if only volunteering to serve in Iraq entitles you to support the war, then surely only having lost a child to the war entitles you to oppose it.
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The point of this post was to point out the power that a grieving mother has. Power comes in lots of shapes and forms. Sometimes one is powerful because one has a lot of money or key connections or great knowledge or big guns and mean friends. Sometimes power comes from using those tools, sometimes from the threat of using those tools. In this case, Sheehan has shifted the news cycle through her power of guilt and pity.
Having lived with my mother, I KNOW the power of guilt, because here is another example of how it was wielded quite effectively.
You might not think that mothers or “retired mothers” are entitled to that power, but there it is. And mothers have been given more power in this department than fathers or other relatives. The media wouldn’t be camped out in Crawford if Sheehan second cousin was out there with a picket sign.
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A nice summary of the Sheehan affair, Laura; thanks. We’ve been so swamped over the last couple of weeks that I’ve given this any attention at all, and it’s worth thinking about.
Remember the Million Mom March? That big march in Washington D.C. back in 2000; women united against gun violence and all that? Because it was a mass event, and thus followed the same patterns as most mass events, it didn’t play out with nearly the kind of focused poignancy that Cindy’s vigil is. Still, many of the same elements were there: the often inchoate yet still almost instinctual assumption that mothers–as opposed to “women,” or “citizens”–are carriers of a particular moral weight. So when someone speaks as a mother against war, or in favor of gun control, or whatever, the normal rules, such as they are, of democratic debate and conflicts of interest presumably change–and not everyone likes that, or knows what to do about it. (My wife, incidentally, very nearly participated in that march, and was on their mailing list for years. One of her best friends did participate, and said it was a great experience.)
Jean Bethke Elshtain wrote something in the Washington Post at the time of the March which I’ve clipped and saved. It’s a great, long piece, which asks some good questions about the complicated way in which “maternal imperatives” intersect with democratic activism. Fortunately, someone put it up on the internet; it’s right here, the item at the top of the page.
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