I've just been listening to a speech by a recently widowed Canadian woman. Her husband was killed in a roadside bomb in Afghanistan Canadians still want to believe they are the world's peace keepers - they are something like 48th in the world now, probably because their military is pinned down in the occupation of Afghanistan.
There is such tremendous psychological and social pressure to believe that your loved one died in a noble cause. If you say that your loved one was involved in a good cause, the nation mourns with you. I don't want to belittle anybody's pain or suffering, but if somebody close to you dies in a car accident, you, your family and friends mourn, and the rest of the world goes on about their business. But the entire country of Canada stops every time somebody dies in Afghanistan. Let me chose my words more carefully. Every time a Canadian dies in Afghanistan. When Afghanis, the people that English speaking North Americans are supposedly there to help, die, nobody cares at all. You have to live among these people to understand - they are just as hard, and cold, and self-serving and self-righteous, and delusional as the folks south of the border... the folks they like to look down on.
So this woman gives a speech, calls her husband a hero, and they broadcast the whole thing, over and over, all day long. It's the same in the US, of course, though they can't give as much time over to these things, Americans have been dying 30 times as fast as Canadians.
When Cindy Sheehan took a different posture, the hate that was directed towards that courageous woman was just unbelievable. First she suffered her terrible loss, and then she was demonized for speaking a powerful truth.
My cousin died in Vietnam. It was impossible to see it as anything other than a senseless, meaningless event. He was a juvenile delinquent who was given a choice - the military or jail (I don't know what it's like now, but many, many poorly adjusted young men were given that choice). He joined the military, and after a stint in the brigg at Fort Lewis, the next stop was Vietnam. It was impossible to see anything heroic about any of it, even when I was a child... as an adult I'm afraid things don't look any better.
Is it more heroic if somebody maintains the delusion that it is a good cause, and they lobby hard to go and occupy another country? I don't think so, but it sure is easier to sell it when you put it up on a pedestal and put spotlights on it. I give all my appreciation to Sheehan, who held her ground before an avalanche of propaganda, slander, and hysterical public opinion.
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