ANTI-WAR MOM CINDY SHEEHAN GIVES UP HER PROTEST
Cindy Sheehan, the California mother who became an anti-war leader after her son was killed in Iraq, declared that she was walking away from the peace movement, saying that her son died "for nothing." When President Bush ignored her protest vigil outside his Crawford, TX, ranch, Sheehan became one of the most prominent figures among opponents of the war in August 2005. Now, however, Sheehan - citing her exhaustion caused by the personal, financial and emotional toll of the past two years - wrote in her web diary 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. In her recent 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. 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 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." (CNN)
· Clearly, Mrs. Sheehan is suffering, both physically and emotionally. Pray for her restoration and pray for her salvation in Jesus Christ. He alone can bring to her the confidence and trust that comes with knowing God. Pray that she becomes surrounded with those who know how to pray to the Father and that she is drawn to read the Bible. Praise the Lord that her thinking is changing. May she be healed - mind, body, and spirit. · "Wait on the Lord: be of good courage, and He shall strengthen thine heart; wait, I say, on the Lord." (Psalm 27:14)
