Cindy Sheehan is going home.
This story is so sad. And if every single person in the world was a student in my classroom today, I'd make everyone read and discuss it, including the liberal and conservative reactions from a variety of quarters, just to check in with how he or she feels about the big and small picture in its context.
And throw in this essay written by an active duty soldier deployed in Iraq now while they're at it.
I don't know Cindy Sheehan personally. She could be a real jerk for all I know, and I might leave a conversation with her not necessarily wanting to be her friend, or agreeing with her about very much at all, in spite of our shared feelings about Iraq. Since I don't know her I can't adequately make a judgment as to what her motivations were for embarking on this journey. But I do find it interesting that so much of the negative backlash talks in very angry language about how she was in this for personal gain, and calls her profane names, and questions her humanity on so many levels. This doesn't seem to be a very luxurious road that she's chosen to walk in the past few years at all, and I can't imagine who was throwing money at her to take that less-than-popular road of protest. And if they did, I'm okay with it, because if the public can support Matthew McConaughey while he travels the country in an Airstream trailer and takes a photographic record of his every surfing trip...well, we're screwed up as-is, so get out of your glass house before you throw the rocks.
I don't think it's easy for anyone to put herself out there for public ridicule, and to keep on knocking on a door when the leader of the country won't have a conversation with you must have been quite frustrating. That lack of participation was a hallmark of the way things go, lately, though - or so it seems.
"Wait for the soundbite, friends."
"Let the people who symbolize the 'left' and 'right', 'red' and 'blue' that we have to separate everything into these days sit on opposite sides of Scarborough's split screen and duke it out."
It is the mark of a civilized, confident, and educated (formally or from the school of life, equal parts) person to question, and not to take the surface of every situation for what it is, particularly when that "what is" involves the death of a son. I try to remember that all objects might be larger OR smaller than they appear in every case, but especially in cases of politics and religion and other equally difficult stff. Just ask anyone who's ever ordered anything from a catalog about the powers of optical illusion.
And you'd better bet that if I had been in Cindy Sheehan's shoes, I'd have been screaming at the top of my lungs too, once I woke up from numb shock and managed to trudge even a couple of steps out of the first phase of my grief. I'm not a mother, but I cannot imagine how I'd feel if my child were killed at all, much less in this hateful war of alpha-male domination. I hate it so much anyway, without any personal sacrifice or investment on my own part. I don't have any family members in the active duty military, although many of my male relatives, including my father and grandfathers, served in the Navy and the Marines. I read articles in the paper where the families say how they support their dead son or daughter's desire to serve, and I'm not sure I could be that charitable after the fact, even though admittiing that might get my house spray painted or me labeled an unpatriotic bitch.
Just ask Natalie Maines. All it takes is one sentence of dissent to get yourself on the hook, even if you're many steps removed from the situation.
Although rejecting the cause they died in the name of would certainly not call my love or support for my child into question, I would have such a fundamental difference of opinion with the choice to go that I'm not sure I would ever recover fully from the anger that must surely accompany that loss. And please note that although I don't have a yellow ribbon on my car, I do not condemn or lack support for the people fighting, which is a common empty criticism of liberal politics. God bless them if they're willing to put themselves out there and stand up for their beliefs as I stand up for mine. And also I wear red and blue (not white, so much - ketchup stains, you know) on the 4th of July, and I tear up when I hear the national anthem, and "God Bless America". I know where I was born and I'm glad it's not Afghanistan or Baghdad, and if I really thought for one second that this war was about freeing the women (in particular) there to live a life where they don't have to fear being killed for standing next to a man on a street corner, I might even see the eventual grace in it. But I don't. It's not about that. It's about something much more uncontrollable. It's about subverting a system we don't understand to get at something we don't have enough of, and no good mission has ever been built on that kind of shifting sand.
I'm interested as well in why, at a time when approval ratings (for whatever pittance those are worth) for the president are at an alltime low, when even my conservative Vietnam veteran uncle sits in my living room and says, "We need to get the hell out of there. There's no point," there is still this refusal to discuss the opposing viewpoints so inherent in this war without screaming on CNN. The time for rhetoric is so long past. Even Jon Stewart must feel like he's running out of clips to satirize. And yet there's still no way out, it seems, and a national sense that until this president is done, at least, (and I can barely allow myself to think past that at this point) in Iraq, at least, we will stay. And that, to me, is unfathomable. Even with my minimal knowledge of military tactics, common sense indicates how getting out at this part would be difficult. It's like a massive hole has been dug, where at some point the sides must be shored up if you're on the bottom or the whole thing will come crashing down on top of you.
What I can really get on board with Cindy Sheehan about is that we are "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," as people seem to care more about reality and mediocre "entertainment competition" television than about issues of greater consequence to our national and global well-being. I like Sharon Osborne, but America's Top Talent is actually in the classroom and organizing the Race for the Cure - not balancing ten chickens on its collective head or burping "Freebird".
But there is a finer shade of meaning here, in this condemnation of the "dumbing down" of our society, beyond the supposition that human beings are incapable of great concern over huge issues like war and poverty. These things are so impossible to deal with because they are so immense and unmanageable. People can handle American Idol because it's easy, and they can process it because it's idiocy at its basest, most addictive level. And also it is bright and shiny and it has that same sappy Daughtry song at the end every week, which even I can sing. I mean, wait, Daughtry, isn't that the bald one from this season? Not the bug-eyed Navy bald guy from this year? Right. Regardless, Randy calls them both "dawg", so it's all good, yo.
The fact that Paula Abdul - one of the flightiest relics of a decade whose cup overflowed with flighty. The video with the cat anyone? - a cranky, narcissistic British man and another guy whose vocabulary consists of a total of ten real words plus a few that are made up can command the attention of millions of people for at least two hours every week is a frightening commentary on our societal need to dumb things down, lest we crack under the strain of the real reality. This season had to resort to a debate on the aging form of beatboxing (which at its highest level can be pretty damned cool, but Blake? Not. Doug. E. Fresh. Just sayin'.) for lack of anything more interesting to talk about, because even the talented people were boring. Did you see Melinda? Did she not look drugged at every point when she was not singing? That's all I got.
It's all brain candy - empty calories, easy going down while it rots your neurons. But who doesn't need it sometimes, really? People work hard jobs at places like Victoria's Secret and Microsoft (it's all the same...shilling a product.) They have family struggles in duplexes and mansions. They sit or stand for hours in some form of commuter hell, and shop in stores where they may or may not be bombarded with "We Built This City", by Starship (please read the trivia, if you care about such things. Amazing.) in the grocery store. So at night it's Snackwells and Idol, and maybe that shores you up to face another day. (I don't know about you, but for me it's Shear Genius and a glass of wine on Wednesdays. And did I mention that the finale is tomorrow night? I never said I was immune to this stuff. I just pick a different channel most of the time.)
A focus on pop culture at this intense level also fuels our need to witness competition and that whole "triumph of the human spirit" thing that sold ad space on ABC's Wide World of Sports for decades. Except in this case, the human spirit's triumph lands you in a Coca-Cola commercial with nine other contestants in carefully contrasting outfits. I stop myself, and I wonder why I care about these things, realizing that I got sucked in without my knowledge, and I force myself to think about things that are infinitely more important but over which I have so much less .
America also loves a tragedy and a trainwreck, which is the why the horrifying pictures of Lindsay Lohan from yesterday morning are all over the trash gossip blogs. I've seen a couple, and it's safe to say she looked half-dead. Again - easy to look at with a healthy dose of schadenfreude (hello, spelled that right the first time. Amazing!) in your morning coffee. But if that was your real life, and that was your real friend, wouldn't you pick her up and dust her off and drive her home before it got any worse? I would. A nation - or at least a media - so obsessed with Anna Nicole Smith is a nation that is clearly hurting. And I wish I knew what to do about that beyond making facile statements about balancing it out, paying equal attention to the light and the heavy, and forwarding links of "Faces of the Fallen" to my friends as wells as screenshots from People.com. You know, so we don't forget that a world away from where Lindsay's passed out in her Mercedes, and where Britney is composing a shockingly eloquent blog post about her own tiny world of likely valid human suffering, people are dying in a dusty hellhole because they really believe that they're doing the right thing. And that most of the those people have mothers, and although those moms won't perhaps shout from the White House lawn like Sheehan, maybe they should. How can you not scream, or want to, knowing these things are happening?
I think the question on every level is, "What are we doing?" Or, more to the point, "What am I doing?" I honestly believe - and I'm not meaning to sound hysterical but perhaps I am anyway - that we are at a very precarious time in history where our words and actions matter perhaps more than ever, but for the most part people are so distracted with the glut of information and things to worry about that we don't know what to do or say first. Does one volunteer? Write letters? Work for a nonprofit? I've done all of those things at one point or another and I do know that one action alone doesn't solve anything. My next step is a personal choice to devote the next phase of my life to trying to contribute to the conversation in a more constructive, action-oriented way.
Our basic structure as a capitalist country puts self-interest and involvement above everything else to build us the strongest base it could. It allowed people to come here from Ireland and Korea and, yes, Iraq to build businesses and go to school and learn what the books and the streets had to offer, both good and bad. It afforded my family a spot in the middle class in mid-20th century DC, a toehold that it's harder and harder to maintain, because nobody has gotten much beyond it, but that's actually okay. It also fostered the ability of well-connected people like the Bush family to essentially form a "business" that happens to be the Presidency of the United States, and I don't know to what degree that has impacted where we find ourselves today. That's one of the big, existential questions - the sort of rib roast of a question that makes you reach for a hamburger instead, or maybe, on a worse day, a Twinkie. For some reason this Sheehan story has me really charged up, and angry, on a level that surprises even me. I hope that somewhere in whatever spiritual form he exists, Casey is proud of her for going to bat for him and all the brothers and sisters in arms that he has. I don't know what happens after death and am not a huge fan of people who tell me there's a policy and procedure for it all. But I do know that if there is a heaven, and I were there by the same means he was, I'd like to send my mom some telepathic gratitude for walking up to the person she held responsible for my death and give them hell. I'd do the same thing for her, and God knows if I had kids it would be on.
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