I don't think that Cindy Sheehan has ever been pro-Bush or even neutral. She says that she's been a lifelong Democrat, and she didn't vote for Bush either, according to her interviews. It appears, though, that she had kept her views relatively quiet till her son's death, and she passed up her opportunity to confront Bush with questionings at the meeting that Bush arranged with her, her family, and other military families whose children got killed in Iraq, because she probably deferred to her husband's opinion. Her husband is now divorcing her. The Cindy Sheehan story is a feminist story.
> Charles Brown wrote:
> > Changing Americans' minds on the war is the main aim of the peace
> movement.
>
> Not exactly. It's the condition of the war and the blatant nonsense
> put
> out by the war's defenders that is changing minds. The peace movement
> doesn't need to do that and in fact can't do that. People change their
> minds in response to conditions in their lives, which includes the
> 'big'
> events that happen to catch their attention.
>
> What the Peace Movement has to do is (a) convert that passive
> opinion to
> _active_ opposition, and (b) (for the future) persuade as many of
> those
> activists as possible that they need to attend to the overall
> context of
> the war -- i.e. shift them from seeing the war as an aberration or
> mistake or bit of stupidity on Bush's part to seeing it as part of a
> larger pattern. _How_ much larger a pattern varies greatly from
> case to
> case & is determined in local contexts.
>
> Lacking the kind of context which, in the case of the 60s, I have
> characterized as a "general uproar" (and in the '60s was triggered
> mostly by the civil-rights movement and the urban insurrections), it
> will be extremely difficult to achieve either of these tasks. It
> will be
> not just difficult but impossible if we think we have to persuade
> people
> to change their minds, for then we will be ignoring the '60% +/-
> who are
> already passively on our side and focusing instead on a 40% +/- who
> are
> against us and will stay against us no matter what we do.
>
> Carrol
Cindy Sheehan is a godsend. At least she managed to put anti-war activism on the media -- every day! I read about one small-town Ohio woman driving all the way down to Texas to stand with her.
What Chuck (of Infoshop.org, to avoid confusion with other Chucks) often says is true: media coverage is much better if you do a newsworthy thing outside the Beltway (like Crawford, Texas). A rally (or even direct action) in D.C. has to be really, really big to make an impact.
Activists began to organize vigils in support of her. There was one in Columbus yesterday. Tomorrow, there's gonna be vigils organized by MoveOn nationwide. This is a pretty good prelude to the demonstration on September 24th.
Unfortunately, ticket sales for buses from Columbus are not going so well. I wish I could help, but mrzine.org is taking up all my time (and I'm still behind my publishing schedule)!
Also, there needs to be something other than vigils and demonstrations that people can do. Any good idea?
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org> * Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: <http://montages.blogspot.com/2005/07/mahmoud- ahmadinejads-face.html>; <http://montages.blogspot.com/2005/07/chvez- congratulates-ahmadinejad.html>; <http://montages.blogspot.com/ 2005/06/iranian-working-class-rejects.html>