My response to Cindy Sheehan: "never give up"

[mistertrickster]

I also was saddened by Cindy Sheehan's resignation as the spokesperson against the war.

When I heard her speak on television, she seemed terribly weary of the entire ordeal. That's very understandable: she and people like her (people like US, in fact) are trying to change an entire political-economic-media SYSTEM that is based on war and the threat of war. It's what the 60's leftists called "The Establishment"--the status quo that has what it wants and knows how to keep it.

The Establishment has all the money, all the power, all the connections, all the clout, all the media control, and we dissidents are continually consigned to the "radical fringe." It's not even a David vs. Goliath match up . . . more like an ant trying to topple the Colossus of Rhodes.

It's easy to lose heart and just give up.

But I think John Kennedy said it best in his inaugural address, "All this will not be finished in the first 100 days. Nor will it be finished in the first 1,000 days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin. . . . Now the trumpet summons us again--not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are--but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, 'rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation'--a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself."

We are in a "long twilight struggle," and the struggle is everything. Win or lose, we are the ones who resist, who say "not in my name," who demand that democracy represent the will of the people instead of the will of the powerful, who stand up against the war-monger and the hate-monger and fear-monger and who tell the truth.

This long, twilight struggle can never be won--it can only be fought. Each generation must pick up the standard from the one before it. We must (Kennedy again) "not shrink from the responsibility--we must welcome it."

The only victory we can be assured of is that we are right. The same patriotic blood flows in our veins as in our nation’s founders' when they said "Never!" to a three penny English tax. They didn't rebel against the mightiest military power of their day so that we might become slaves to our own government.

We are the stiff-necked people who will not bow, who will not yield, who will not retreat or surrender--for our allegiance is to no king or country, it is to nothing less than "the common good."