On Second Thought

After writing that last post I looked to Black Five to see what he had to say. And Grim put me in my place.

I've said a lot of bad things about Sheehan in the last couple of years. Most of them were generated from the outrageous headlines that she caused worldwide that portrayed our Country in a bad light. A lot of the cynicsm that surrounds my views of the American political system come from close to the same sources as hers. And in the end, especially after reading what I just did, I feel bad.

I'm debating taking down that last post--something I have never done and have kept myself from doing, even when I didn't like what I had wrote.

Cindy Sheehan is a grieving mother. I sympathize entirely with the motivation. I cannot imagine what the loss of my son would do to me; I would be grateful to the world, I think, if it refused to judge any action I took for at least a year or two afterwards. And so, applying the Golden Rule, I shall refuse to judge her. I hope she finds the peace she needs.

I have no use for those who are using her to further their ends -- nor those who are so heartless as to speak ill of her, in the depth of her pain.
Yes, I know she was a radical before the war began. That means nothing. She is a Gold Star mother, and so she is due a full measure of kindness from us. May she find her peace. May those who are trying to use her get what they deserve. As for those who have sneered at her character -- no one asks you to approve of her, or what she thinks, or how she feels. All I ask is that you let her rage, and pass on, without judgment. That, at least, is only what we should want for ourselves if, under an evil star, we should find ourselves brought to her fate.

Lastly, I was pretty busy yesterday and didn't have time to write. Black Five also has a fantastic post about Memorial Day. Read it here.

For Once We Agree

And so comes the end of an unbelieveable headache era. After making life relatively miserable for troops worldwide for years (well, ok, not miserable--just annoying), she's finally going home.

Cindy Sheehan is quitting.

In her "farewell" speech, she actually brought up, ahem, some good points. Please wait while I take another shot of Jack.

Ok. In the end, it appears that we have some common views. No, not things that have changed on my end since the beginning, just things that she finally realized after embarrassing herself for the last two years.

"I've been wondering why I'm killing myself and wondering why the Democrats caved in to George Bush," Sheehan told The Associated Press while driving from her property in Crawford to the airport, where she planned to return to her native California.

"I'm going home for awhile to try and be normal," she said.

Yeah, good luck with that one. At least she acknowledges the "not normal" part of her life.

Sheehan criticized "blind party loyalty" as a danger, no matter which side it involved, and said the current two-party system is "corrupt" and "rapidly descending into with nary a check or balance: a fascist corporate wasteland."

"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.

Couldn't have said it better. Pessimistic? Cycnical? Yeah--the country's changed a bit in the last decade.

And lastly, the one thing that I've known all along about her, and she would have saved a marriage and a lot of time, effort, and money had she just thought about this and kept her yap shut:

"Good-bye America ... you are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can't make you be that country unless you want it.

"It's up to you now."

Commencement

Some great words from Rudy Guilliani's commencement address at my Alma Mater:

The Cold War took years, but we prevailed, and it will happen. And on that day, because you’re going to achieve it, your generation will take its place
beside the greatest generations in our nation’s history. Our ideas of freedom,
democracy, respect for human rights, respect for human life, and the rule of
law—these are the principles that the human heart and the human soul yearns for. These are gifts that are given to us, not by government, not by men or women. These are gifts that are given to us by God. They’re the principles along with the strength and skill and valor of the men and women like The Citadel graduates of 2007 that make me completely confident that we’ll win the terrorist war on us. We will win. We will prevail.

The terrorists who attacked us on September 11 misjudged the character of
the United States of America. They thought that freedom makes us weak. They thought that democracy makes us decadent. They thought that our diversity made us easy to divide and conquer. It’s a mistake that tyrants have made in the past about America. All of these principles, all of these principles make us stronger. You are the leaders of the 9-11 generation and I believe that you and I have learned the same lessons from our history and from our past. Never retreat. Never wave the white flag of defeat. America doesn’t retreat. America advances.

I’d like to leave you with a memory from the September 11th day. It was
captured in the now famous photograph showing three firefighters covered in ash, raising the American flag over the rubble of Ground Zero. There were fires below their feet of 2000 degrees or more. Their actions echoed the photograph of the flag being raised over Iwo Jima a half century before. It looked very similar. In America, the heroic example of past generations are carried on and built upon by the next generation. When I saw those firefighters, I saw in their eyes, and I saw in their action the same thing that their fathers would have done or their grandfathers would have done in the same situation, and they did the same thing. In the face of being attacked, in the face of having their lives in jeopardy, in the face of watching their brothers and comrades die in front of them, what they said was, we don’t retreat. We don’t put our heads down. We don’t back up. We stand for something bigger than us. We stand for democracy. We stand for liberty. We stand for freedom. We stand for peace. And we’re going to put up our flag, and hold it there, and it is going to prevail, and it is going to wave as a symbol of freedom and democracy for us. And we don’t want to impose it on anyone else. We want to give it to them. Share it with them as a gift that isn’t ours alone, but a gift that comes from God. No one knows that better, no one understands that better than the graduates of this class. You’ve learned it. You’ve put it in your hearts. It’s been taught to you, and now we’re counting on you. We’re counting on you to be the leaders of the 9-11 generation, and if we’re going to count on you to be the leaders, I am very, very confident that we are going to prevail.

God bless you, and God bless America.

Leader

I've been thinking of writing about politics, Iraq, anything going on in the world like I used to. But I just can't.

I read through my news blogs, reading about how the media is calling today the "3rd Bloodiest Day of the War,"about how Iran has banned IAEA inspectors from their country, or how the #2 Al Qaeda dude is taunting us regarding our new Iraq strategy. It makes my head hurt.

The world is not better today than it was when I started blogging from a war zone. And it's not the military's fault. I would venture to say that it's not even the President's fault, although my reading of Cobra II doesn't help my opinions of the administration. If I had to point a finger at anyone, I would point it again at the politicians in Washington as a whole, as I did over a year ago. There are so many fingers in this pie now that no one knows what to even do with it, and the combination of a sensationalist media coupled with self-serving politicians makes it monumentally worse. Again, I point my fingers at them and ask, "how many of you have sons in Iraq?" They make such a stink over everything, both Democrat and Republican, and fight and bicker so much that nothing gets done--so they take a day off to watch the BCS Title game.

How can our government survive while operating like this? How many people are going to die before someone, anyone, steps up and unifies those who are making decisions about our lives? Our next president has to be a leader--at this point I almost don't care what he stands for, as long as those who make the decsions will follow him.

That's why it's hard for me to pick a topic--because the system seems so broken that discussing it only gets me angry and frustrated.