Cindy Sheenan is a walking disgrace insulting her brave son's memory.
- From: "staten" <staten@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 13 Aug 2005 13:10:42 -0400
By InstaPunk
August 11, 2005
Stepping in it.
WHEN MOMS CRY. Since nobody else will say it, I will. This woman is
having an ugly nervous breakdown, and if her family have any sense of
dignity or propriety they will go to Texas and drag her home.
I understand the circumspection that has accompanied most commentary
on the matter of Cindy Sheehan. She's a mother who (gulp) lost her son.
Thus, even those who are deeply offended by her rhetoric express it
indirectly. They blame the leftist hate machine which has obviously worked
hard to exploit her, or they speak on behalf of the military mindset which
is not flattered by the attempt to reduce their brave sacrifices to
victimhood. You can see this kind of tact well executed by Michelle Malkin,
Debra Saunders, and others all over the internet. Ms. Malkin and Bill
O'Reilly discussed the matter on television and couldn't begin a single
exchange without reiterating their profound sympathy for Ms. Sheehan. I
appreciate their dilemma, but there are too many important points at issue
here to let it go.
Yes, it is a terrible thing to lose a child. But I'm getting tired of
hearing the rote assertion that it's the worst thing that can ever happen to
you, you never get over it, and no one who hasn't had the experience can
ever understand. It's as if this category of event, "lose a child,"
represents some kind of emotional tree-line which, once passed,
automatically elevates a person into a new state of existence from which
ordinary mortals are excluded. It's the Skull & Bones of parenthood, an
elite membership which confers extraordinary privilege and exemption from
all merely human judgment or criticism.
Pardon me, but that's a crock. On several levels. Anyone who has lived
more than a few decades comes to understand that life is largely about loss.
The longer we survive, the more we lose: grandparents, parents, friends,
lovers, wives, husbands, family, pets, and any number of dreams,
possessions, and ideals, including -- for many -- faith, hope, and love. The
whole idea that there is a Publisher's Clearinghouse Jackpot of Loss is
absurd and demeaning to the human spirit.
A relatively recent addition to our psychological jargon is the term
emotional intelligence. Surely it's emotional idiocy to declare all
instances of the generic event "lose a child" equal. The perception of
"worst thing in the world" is easy to appreciate in the case of parents who
lose a small child to abduction, murder, disease, or accident. There is the
awareness that there was never any choice by the child, that there can be no
compensation of any kind for the loss, and that in addition to the terrible
void they must live with, the parents may also feel guilt for having failed
to protect their helpless, innocent offspring from the twists of fate before
they had a chance to live life.
It may seem mean-spirited to suggest, but I will, that even in these
kinds of tragedies not every parent is equal. No matter how many times we
dutifully repeat the mantra, many of us must suspect that there are parents
who do get over their loss and damned quickly at that. We can also surmise
that others learn not to look back with the same degree of agonizing
intensity. Most hurts hurt less over time unless we choose to make them into
a cross or an excuse. That's not bad. It's the source of human strength. We
go on. We live through loss. Otherwise, no culture would survive
earthquakes, floods, famines, epidemics, and wars.
Except for losing a child, of course. How many parents have we taught
to cling tightly to their grief lest they feel less of it and enter a new
purgatory of guilt for not being exquisitely sensitive enough to remain
emotionally ruined for all their days?
For whatever reason, we have exalted grief in this nation to a
supernatural force that must be honored and appeased rather than overcome.
As recently as the Victorian era, infant and child mortality was so
pervasive that few large families did not experience it. Before the age of
modern medicine, sudden, unexpected death was an everyday companion of the
living. They learned to control grief with defined periods of mourning in
prescribed clothes and then to proceed with life. And they learned not to
lose their faith and humility in the process.
Now we teach even our youngest children that grief is a devouring god
to whom they must genuflect whenever the bad thing happens. Every incident
at school -- fire, death, insect infestation -- is followed by an invasion
of professional grief counselors who carefully implant the idea that what
has happened will resonate through the rest of their lives like some gong of
doom.
We have taught ourselves to view the grief-stricken as secular saints
imbued with the mystery of new age stigmata, and we watch in awe as they
bleed continuously from their invisible wounds. In their actions we
consecrate what we cannot comprehend, and we collectively offer up to them
the key to a kind of free-fire zone, in which they can act out all they want
while we do their penance for them in hushed, admiring tones.
Has it helped? No. Are the eternally bleeding really saints? No. The
evidence indicates that the death of a child tends to destroy marriages
these days, promote substance abuse, vandalize careers, and perpetuate
depression. Appeasing and worshipping grief strengthens the power of grief
and causes people to lapse into self-absorbed obsessions.
But we must not blow the whistle on Cindy Sheehan? She has contrived
to turn her son's death and the whole Iraq War into her own personal soap
opera. This was all something done to her. By the President of the United
States, no less. Let us take all our cameras to Texas and watch her bleed
from her hands and feet. Nonsense. It's time for some plain talk.
Her plight is a very far cry from that of a mother who views the
mutilated body of her six-year old daughter at the morgue. Cindy Sheehan's
son was a man -- more a full-grown man than his mother is a full-grown
woman -- and the sacrifice that was made was his, not hers, willingly given
in return for compensations that made sense to him at the time he decided to
join the military.
She does defame his life and his memory by behaving like a spoiled
adolescent on the national stage, by lying, and by actively seeking to
humiliate her (and our) Commander-in-Chief. We do her son no honor by
pretending that her behavior is anything other than what it is -- a
disgraceful exhibition of self-annihilating selfishness which reveals the
sickness of the conviction that every loss is total, inconsolable, and
license to revert to the infantile fantasy of a universe with ourselves at
the center.
It's also sad and ironic that we entangle her tantrum with the concept
of motherhood. Her accomplices in assaulting the national war effort are,
lest we forget, of the political stripe which views motherhood as a game of
craps, with every player free to plunk her fertilized egg on the "Pass" or
"Don't Pass" line, depending on her whims of the moment. They believe that
she is to feel NO grief for the innocent life she takes herself while
retaining the infinite right to make the whole world accountable if the life
she chooses to perpetuate should somehow perish before it reaches the age of
mandatory commitment to nursing homes and Medicaid-financed euthanasia. How
is this preferable to a short heroic life given freely as a gift for others,
in the name of home and liberty?
This is perversion. And it's time somebody said it out loud. Cindy
Sheehan, your son died a hero. Go home now and find some meaning in it that
isn't just about you and the politics of those who hate their country.
.
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