I feel like I need a shower.

[Prisoner_Number_Six]

Once upon a time there was a woman. This woman had a son. The son went off to a war that turned out to be meaningless. One day the son was killed. The mother, in her shock and rage at the horrible and unjust ending of her son's life, stood up and faced down the monster directly responsible for this travesty, and in doing so she became the cornerstone of a national movement.

She gave up her life to this movement. She traveled thousands of miles, spent countless nights trying to sleep in strange, cramped rooms, and gave endlessly and tirelessly of herself so others would feel and understand her rage, and perhaps somehow help to find a meaning for her son's death.

She dared an insane man to meet her face to face so she could talk to him. When he ran away from her she thus exposed him as a coward and a bully. She stood tall and strong, her dead son's memory giving her the strength to go another day, stand before another group of people, and tell them why this war was WRONG.

She was famous, and people hung on her every word. What she was trying to do seemed to be working.

Then all of a sudden, it all seemed to go wrong. She said something somebody didn't like. They took offense. They spoke out. They tried to paint an image of a self-serving person who sought out the spotlight simply because she enjoyed it.

They were wrong.

It started feeling to this woman that her message had been lost. It started feeling to this woman that they were trying to take her sorrow and her rage and twist it to say and mean different things. They were becoming hostile to her personally. It began to seem to her they were trying to line up at her son's grave so they could take a piss on it. It frightened her and frustrated her and insulted her that these people would take her motherly sorrow and try to dirty it and her dead son.

One day she grew so weary of fighting the very people who had begun by marching with her and singing with her and standing with her, she decided to pack up her sorrow and go back home to try to find a measure of privacy and peace for herself, and perhaps find a way to put her dead son to honorable rest once and for all.

And many of the people contemptuously laughed at her and said she was running away, and they said "What a disappointment."

But how many of those people have lost sons and daughters to the monster? How many of them have criss-crossed the nation trying to get people to see the monster for what it is? How many miles have they walked in HER shoes? How many times have they stood outside the White House, daring the monster to come out and face them? How many nights have they been forced to sleep in jail cells, arrested for publicly speaking their words of unendurable pain?

How many?

Well?