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| Peter Hercules |
 Posted: Mon Jun 04, 2007 7:37 am |
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Joined: 09 Jan 2006
Posts: 175
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The Education of Cindy Sheehan
Having peripherally followed the story of Cindy Sheehan over the last two years, I am now able to say that she finally ‘got it’ and has won my admiration. It is most significant that she achieved this at the very moment that she walked away from being the ‘face’ of the movement against the war in Iraq.
In case you are not familiar with Ms. Sheehan, her twenty-four year old son, Casey, was a soldier that was killed in Iraq in 2004. In August of 2005 she decided to travel to Crawford, Texas, and waited there outside of George Bush’s ranch in order to talk to him about the war and her son’s death. That conversation never took place but during her month long vigil there she drew large crowds of supporters and gained tremendous media attention. Since then she has been involved in numerous anti-war protests, both within and outside of the USA, along the way becoming the most recognized activist against the Iraq war.
On May 29, 2007, however, Ms. Sheehan decided to ‘resign’ as the unofficial leader of the protest movement (see http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18919775/ ). In so doing she stated that:
…. the most devastating conclusion she had reached “was that Casey did indeed die for nothing ... killed by his own country which is beholden to and run by a war machine that even controls what we think.”
“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,” she wrote. “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.”
At last she has taken, or at least begun to take, appropriate responsibility for her son’s death and she has started to understand the reality within which she and all of us are operating.
Soldiers that go off to fight and kill complete strangers as part of the ‘war machine’ that Ms. Sheehan refers to, do so because they have been indoctrinated by their parents (and society in general) to believe in the anti-life system that is run by that war machine. If parents refused to co-operate with this indoctrination process, their children would not end up being killed and/or killing simply in order to obtain more wealth for the owners of civilization. However, any parent that allows this to happen to their child is very responsible for the harm that befalls their child and whatever harm that their child causes.
Etienne de la Boetie eloquently addressed this issue in the 1550s in ‘The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude’:
“Poor, wretched, and stupid peoples, nations determined on your own misfortune and blind to your own good! You let yourselves be deprived before your own eyes of the best part of your revenues; your fields are plundered, your homes robbed, your family heirlooms taken away. You live in such a way that you cannot claim a single thing as your own; and it would seem that you consider yourselves lucky to be loaned your property, your families, and your very lives. All this havoc, this misfortune, this ruin, descends upon you not from alien foes, but from the one enemy whom you yourselves render as powerful as he is, for whom you go bravely to war, for whose greatness you do not refuse to offer your own bodies unto death. He who thus domineers over you has only two eyes, only two hands, only one body, no more than is possessed by the least man among the infinite numbers dwelling in your cities; he has indeed nothing more than the power that you confer upon him to destroy you. Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you? The feet that trample down your cities, where does he get them if they are not your own? How does he have any power over you except through you? How would he dare assail you if he had no cooperation from you? What could he do to you if you yourselves did not connive with the thief who plunders you, if you were not accomplices of the murderer who kills you, if you were not traitors to yourselves? You sow your crops in order that he may ravage them, you install and furnish your homes to give him goods to pillage; you rear your daughters that he may gratify his lust; you bring up your children in order that he may confer upon them the greatest privilege he knows---to be led into his battles, to be delivered to butchery, to be made the servants of his greed and the instruments of his vengeance; you yield your bodies unto hard labor in order that he may indulge in his delights and wallow in his filthy pleasures; you weaken yourselves in order to make him the stronger and the mightier to hold you in check. From all these indignities, such as the very beasts of the field would not endure, you can deliver yourselves if you try, not by taking action, but merely by willing to be free. Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces?”
Another famous American activist, Jack Kevorkian, was released from prison on June 1, 2007. As I wrote in an article on Kevorkian in the forum on my website (http://www.untamedlife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=113), after being imprisoned he, too, began to understand reality, as he expressed with the following:
“The American people are sheep. They’re comfortable, rich, working… It’s like the Romans. They’re happy with bread and their spectator sports. The Super Bowl means more to them than any right. Look at the forces against me – the government, the American Medical Association, pharmaceutical companies and religion. Is there anything more powerful than these four? I succeeded in verifying the Dark Ages is (sic) still with us.”
Cindy Sheehan’s anger had been misdirected towards George Bush and company rather than towards herself. She fundamentally betrayed her son and herself and has now found the courage to confront that very painful reality. By going to Crawford to speak to George Bush she further humiliated and disempowered herself.
To her tremendous credit she has learned a great deal over the past two years and has wisely left Crawford to go home. By giving up on the system, she is doing her part to allow the Colossus to ‘fall of his own weight and break into pieces.’ Each one of us has that same opportunity. |
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Dr. Peter Hercules
http://www.untamedlife.com/ |
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