This isnt about politics, its about grief. Its about a growing group of ordinary citizens trying to teach this callous cowboy how to care,even as he bikes away his worries while the families of the 46 soldiers killed in the month of August alone attend funerals....
The Bush administration, though, has spared little effort and expense when it comes to shielding the grim reality of the war in Iraq from the public eye. Flag-draped coffins return to Dover in the dead of night, the corridors of Walter Reed Army Medical Center have been scrubbed from the slick-and-glossy covers of the print media, our TV screens have been sanitized, the slate of remembrance wiped clean and the public experience of war reduced to sterile statements of military commanders mindlessly mimicking the words we are at war.
As Andrew Rosenthal stated in his November 14, 2003 New York Times editorial: this White House has done everything it can to keep Mr. Bush away from the families of the dead, at least when there might be a camera around. The wounded, thousands of them, are even more carefully screened from the public. And the Pentagon has continued its ban on media coverage of the return of flag-draped coffins to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, denying the dead soldiers and their loved ones even that simple public recognition of sacrifice.
George Bush has not attended a single funeral of a fallen soldier. What is more, he has persistently sought to thwart any public, communal, nationwide mourning for these losses and thus denied all of us the opportunity to honor the dead. He has, in essence, placed a moratorium on mourning. And in so doing, he has done the people of this country a grave disservice, for, as Thomas Doherty, author of Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture and World War II rightly points out, people of this nation also have a need to grieve. ...
But Cindy Sheehan has succeeded in putting a human face on a nation at warhers is an attempt to force the administration to face the facts in a face-to-face confrontation with death and the lives that are destroyed and inalterably changed by it.