Cindy Sheehan is bumping up against the edges of reality, and has begun to realize that she has been (gasp) used. Knowledge is pain.
Knowledge is the basis of wisdom, but merely because Sheehan has begun to poke the walls of the media bubble she filled with emotional hot air does not necessarily mean that she is approaching wisdom. But at least she recognizes the dimensions of her immediate prison. I'm not so sure she realizes the extent to which she put herself in it and let it become reinforced.
You see she still says that her son, the soldier, died for nothing.
To accept the premise that soldiers die for nothing is to accept the idea that wars are meaningless. Wars are infused with meaning because people die, but moreover because men are sent to kill. Those men who are soldiers live by rules of engagement, thus killing and destruction are their jobs. To disagree with the higher purpose of those jobs is a political disagreement, one that is also chockablock with meaning. To assert that there is no meaning, actually means that there is no value to those jobs in service of the political aim one has chosen. There are two choices of political aim, one subtle, the other obvious.
The obvious choice in political aim is that of pacifism. Pacifism is the only political aim which squarely says that there is no higher purpose in the job of soldiering. A pacifist must surely look at a soldier as some kind of sick opportunist who can serve no good end. That is something that must be obvious to a pacifist - but then how could Cindy Sheehan be that? If she had the courage of that conviction then she would have disowned her son the soldier the moment he donned the uniform and took his oath. But her tears, were we to take them seriously, would defy that position.
She might have then taken a more subtle aim in her political difference. Perhaps she thought that soldiering could serve a higher purpose, but she was just politically opposed to that purpose. Instead, she managed to be one of those delusional and oxymoronic people who 'support the troops' yet oppose their mission.
There is but one explanation in my eyes. Cindy Sheehan's position as an 'anti-war mom' was that her motherhood was the greatest purpose of all. She could love her son, the soldier, not because of the man that he chose to be, nor the oath he swore to uphold, but simply because he was her son. It didn't matter what kind of man he was, his life would only matter to her as a son matters to a mother. He was her child, always. We are reminded of the kind of face only a mother could love. She could overlook all of the politics, all of the facts of the adult world in service of the emotional commitment and pathos of a grieving mother. Call me a heartless bastard, but I never fell for it.
In the end, Cindy Sheehan must be convinced that her son died for her and her alone. Thus she alone can be the sole arbiter of what meaning his life and death meant. Now that her media campaign has run off the rails established by Democrat operatives and the MSM she is stuck with trying to find some new way to spin 'meaningless death'. Good luck. The real world has already decided. She will never be free of her prison until she realizes that she and Army Specialist Casey Sheehan are symbols and that their meaning is not in their exclusive control.
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