Mother's Day in Crawford

[G_j]

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0826-21.htm

Published on Friday, August 26, 2005 by CommonDreams.org

Mother's Day in Crawford

by Medea Benjamin and Gayle Brandeis

When Cindy Sheehan marched into Crawford, Texas to ask President Bush why her son died in Iraq, it was Mother's Day. Not the Hallmark-infused, soft focus, breakfast-in-bed Mother's Day that shows up on the calendar in May. This was the day that Julia Ward Howe envisioned when she created Mother's Day in 1870 as a time for all the mothers who lost their sons in the Civil War to protest the senseless violence.

Howe's Mother's Day Proclamation begins:

Arise then women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!

Cindy Sheehan has risen up against the senseless violence of this war in Iraq, and countless women and men have risen up with her. The numbers at Camp Casey continue to swell, and support pours in from all corners of the globe. While George Bush says he feels Sheehan's pain but must "get on with his life," Sheehan's supporters are uprooting themselves from their lives-often at great personal sacrifice-- to vigil beside her in the hot Texas sun. Tired of seeing our soldiers and countless Iraqis die in an unjustified war, millions of Americans-especially mothers--are joining Sheehan's revolution of the heart. And in the process, they're exposing Bush's own heartlessness for refusing to meet with a grieving mother, and more tragically, for needlessly putting our sons and daughters in harm's way.

Those in the smear-Cindy camp have told Sheehan, in no uncertain terms, that she should go back home, where she belongs. But Sheehan has followed Julia Ward Howe's imperative:


As men have often forsaken
the plough and the anvil
At the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great an earnest day of counsel.

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