Reply #21: Why I started the ALL Cindy DU threads

[Generic Other]

Someone asked me why I would spend 12 days of my life monitoring and collecting in one place all the information available to me on the internet about the vigil in Crawford Texas. It seemed to that person a worthless endeavor. I'm sure there are others wondering why a complete stranger might be motivated to take up Cindy's cause so singlemindedly as to spend all the time and effort necessary to collect a week's worth of articles, photos, interviews and information concerning Cindy Sheehan's peaceful occupation of Crawford in one thread on Democratic Underground.

Part of the reason I did this was my sense that Americans have bad memories. We forget tomorrow what was in our heads today. We cannot trust our own memory of events or anyone else's. So many of us are detached from what is happening in our country, moving through our lives without awareness and thus without memory of events that happen around us, critical life-altering events. We are being swept up and carried into the waters of Lethe, one of the three rivers of Hades, the River of Oblivion.

I have seen Cindy Sheehan's face before this week. Last year, she came to my town to see Bush. She came to Fort Lewis to meet a president who didn't even remember her son's name. I remember her crying afterwards on the local news. Witnessing her anguish expressed so openly on my television screen made my own eyes burn with tears, tears of shame for what my country had taken from Cindy and her family.

Most of us have no clear memory of why we went to war, why we asked Cindy's son to sacrifice his life. The coffins have been erased from our consciousness, the costs of war downplayed and soon forgotten.

But I couldn't forget her face--a mother who had lost her child, and I didn't want anyone else to forget her either.

Cindy Sheehan--ghost, banshee, wandering spirit arrived in Crawford from the grave's edge to speak to the living and remind us all of what had been forgotten.

And that is why I kept a record, so no one could say they didn't remember. Or that it didn't happen that way.