(CNN) -- Cindy Sheehan, the California mother who became an
anti-war leader after her son was killed in Iraq, declared
Monday she was walking away from the peace movement.
She said her son died "for nothing."
Sheehan achieved national attention when she camped outside
President Bush's home in Crawford, Texas, throughout August 2005
to demand a meeting with the president over her son's death.
While Bush ignored her, the vigil made her one of the most
prominent figures among opponents of the war.
But in a Web diary posted to the liberal online community
Daily Kos on Monday, Sheehan said she was exhausted by the
personal, financial and emotional toll of the past two years.
She wrote that she is disillusioned by the failure of
Democratic politicians to bring the unpopular war to an end and
tired of a peace movement she said "often puts personal egos
above peace and human life."
Casey Sheehan, a 24-year-old Army specialist, was killed in
an April 2004 battle in Baghdad. His death prompted his mother
to found Gold Star Families for Peace.
But in Monday's 1,200-word letter, titled, "Good Riddance
Attention Whore," Sheehan announced that her son "did indeed die
for nothing."
"I have tried ever since he died to make his sacrifice
meaningful," she wrote. "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.
"It is so painful to me to know that I bought into this
system for so many years, and Casey paid the price for that
allegiance. I failed my boy and that hurts the most."
Cindy Sheehan's sister, DeDe Miller, told CNN that the group
would continue working for humanitarian causes, but drop its
involvement in the anti-war movement. As for her sister's
letter, Miller said, "She cried for quite a bit after writing
it."
Sheehan warned that the United States was becoming "a fascist
corporate wasteland," and that onetime allies among Bush's
Democratic opposition turned on her when she began trying to
hold them accountable for bringing the 4-year-old war to a
close.
In the meantime, she said her antiwar activism had cost her
her marriage, that she had put the survivor's benefits paid for
her son's death and all her speaking and book fees into the
cause and that she now owed extensive medical bills.
"I am going to take whatever I have left and go home," she
wrote. "I am going to go home and be a mother to my surviving
children and try to regain some of what I have lost.
"I will try to maintain and nurture some very positive
relationships that I have found in the journey that I was forced
into when Casey died and try to repair some of the ones that
have fallen apart since I began this single-minded crusade to
try and change a paradigm that is now, I am afraid, carved in
immovable, unbendable and rigidly mendacious marble."
From Larry
Dicken:
I will miss
you Cindy, but I fully understand your position. If the American
people do not pay attention to what their elected leaders are
doing and remove those who do not represent the will of the
people, then all is lost to the interests of the Fascist
Corporate Elite. If you vote for American Idol, but don't vote
in our elections or vote for the same hacks who betrayed your
trust, you are getting what you wished for and what you deserve.
America as a democratic republic died some time
ago. Only now are some of us realizing this. REST IN PEACE.
Note from late summer 2007: Cindy is giving it
another try. She is running for election in
California against Speaker of the House, Nancy
Pelosi. Nancy may soon be off the table, as the
saying goes.
Jerry Interviews Cindy Sheehan
This will be the fourth Mother's day
that Cindy Sheehan will observe with one of her four
children not able to tell his mom how much he loves her. In
April of 2004, Casey was killed in a battle in Iraq.
In this interview, Jerry talks to
her about her upcoming Mothers March on Washington to be held
the day after Mothers Day, on May 14th, 2007. The discussion
covers her plans for Camp Casey near the Bush ranch in Crawford,
Texas, as well as some of the incidents she has endured while
picketing against the Iraq War.
Almost 4,000 mothers have lost their
sons and daughters since the war started in March 2003.
MP3 Version
64kb Broadband Version Post Production - Jane Swartley
WMA Version - Part 1
32kb Dial-up or Broadband Version Post Production - Jane Swartley
64kb Broadband Version
