Editorials

Editorial: After the First Death By BECKY O'MALLEY

Friday August 19, 2005

As I blew out my candle and walked away from the vigil in front of the French Hotel last night, I told the friends who were with me that this is as close as many of us in Berkeley ever get to church. Demonstrations like this are the most inclusive of our indigenous religious institutions, with all the elements which contribute to a soul-satisfying religious experience. Congregants from my generation spontaneously sang our oldest hymns--“We shall overcome…we shall not be moved….ain’t gonna study war no more”—memorabilia of our successful struggles to end segregation and stop the war in Vietnam.  

We had elders there, the white-haired, fragile but still fiery old commies, and babies like the dimpled smiling grandson of a MoveOn founder. I even wore a holy relic: one of departed trooper Norine Smith’s brilliantly-colored scarves, given to mourners at the wake following her memorial. 

“It won’t make any difference” said my friend the red diaper baby, “but I had to come anyway.” When I first met her, she was flirting with Reaganism (she’ll deny it now) as a reaction to a difficult childhood in the bosom of The Party. But she still believes in hoping. “We should be going to Martinez or somewhere that they don’t know about this,” she said, but Thursday’s dailie s carried stories about vigils in Pleasant Hill and other improbable outposts.  

Those of who periodically attend services like this share a deep-down lingering faith in the perfectibility of the human species. We talk like cynics, but we’re bluffing. Soo ner or later, we think, they’re going to see the light. We marched against the first Gulf war, we marched against the second Gulf war, and it didn’t do any good, so many of us have skipped the last few attempts at big marches. But in Cindy Sheehan we’ve f ound a new Joan of Arc to lead us in battle against the forces of darkness.  

The parents among us are especially moved by her tragedy, a mother’s loss of a child for a cause she cannot even support. It’s not just that we agree with her that it’s a sensel ess war. It’s not about ideology, particularly when most Americans, even some Republicans, now know that Bush’s excuses for going into Iraq were completely manufactured.  

We join vigils to support Cindy Sheehan because we understand her pain as if it were our own. Pundits have been saying that opposition to this folly would be stronger if the television news shows carried pictures of flag-draped coffins, as they did during the Vietnam war, or will be greater when the body count rises. But Cindy Sheehan’s manifest grief over her son’s death illustrates what Dylan Thomas said about the death of another child: “After the first death, there is no other.” We don’t need to hear from more mothers of dead children to know what we have to do. 

The mothers of the living are starting to cry out as well. We received this letter on Wednesday from Evelyn Hannett of Christiansburg, VA: 

 

I too have a son in Iraq and am worried every single minute of my waking day that my son will be another casualty like Casey Sheehan. Doesn’t the president even care what this is doing to the families here in his own country just waiting for that day when they find out their precious loved one has been killed in a senseless war ? Is he going to be able to financially take care of the single mother that can no longer work because she can’t cope with holding down a job because she is crying all the time ?  

These men and women that are in Iraq have good jobs, are a asset to society and have families that love them deeply. If the Preside nt wants to “fix” a country he just needs to look in his own back yard. We have people starving, homeless people, people that are sick and can’t afford medicine. We have the single mother raising children making $6 per hour. Some of that money that is bei ng spent in Iraq could be spent on “Our Country.”  

President Bush obviously does doesn’t care for the people in his own country or he would have our troops home and safe. Let other countries handle their own affairs, who died and appointed President Bush ruler of the world ? 

What does it have to take to make President Bush wake up and bring our troops home ?  

If anything happens to my son and he does not make it home alive, I am holding President Bush responsible. He needs to send his own daughters over there and then see how he feels about this senseless war.  

Thank you for your time.  

 

Thank you for taking the time to write to us, Ms. Hannett, and for your courage in saying what many other parents would like to say. We’d like you to know that many of us here do still believe, as our old song says, that we will overcome someday. We’ve won some big battles, and we will win this one if we persevere. We didn’t end racism, but we did stop segregation. We didn’t end war for all time, but we did end one war in our time. We’ll do our best to help you get your son home alive from this one.  

 

 

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