Cindy Sheehan "retires"

conyat
Sat, 02 Jun 2007 16:22:10 +0000

I found it sad and surprising that there was so little sympathy for Cindy Sheehan when she first lost her son and tried to speak to the President.



It’s amazing. I saw a link on the Free Republic site (a large discussion forum for conservatives). The linked article was about the % of soldiers in Iraq that come from rural areas where most people earn less than the median income.

They interviewed a mother who had lost her son in Iraq when his Humvee hit a roadside bomb and overturned. She didn’t say one thing negative about the war. Nor did the article; it just pointed out where the majority of the troops are coming from.

Some of the Freepers comments on the article were horrible, including, since he came from a rural area, he could have rolled his Jeep just as easily at home, so he shouldn’t even be considered a casualty of the war at all.

Part of it I think is that in America we like to blame the victim, because somehow that means that whatever happened to them won’t happen to us, because we aren’t going to be as unwise, unworthy, etc as they are. Some of it I think is the generalized hostility in our society to women who speak out. The rest is the knee jerk reaction that some have anytime their beliefs are challenged.



how could any president refuse to meet with a grieving mother



Some of the moms he has met with have had not very good things to say, so it’s probably in his best PR interests to avoid them. He gave one mom a special coin to commemorate her son’s death and told her “now don’t go selling it on E-bay.”