Cindy Sheehan: The Human Face of A Nation at War

[GettysbergII]

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_lilian_f_050812_cindy_sheehan__the_h.htm

by Lilian Friedberg

One sorely neglected aspect of the Cindy Sheehan story concerns public expression of mourning. Ronald Reagan’s death called for an entire week of public mourning, and myriad other instances of public mourning in response to the death of a single individual mark the landscape of recent US-history: the death of John Lennon in 1980, of John Kennedy Jr. in 1999, of Christopher Reeve in 2004, Pope John Paul II earlier this year, and most recently, of ABC news anchor Peter Jennings. Public mourning in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombings, the Challenger and Columbia disasters and the 9/11 attacks was widespread, fuelled in large part by a veritable carpet-bombing of memorials delivered to our living rooms by the corporate media. All of us took time out of our busy schedules to mark the tragedies in public displays of despair, and the effect was cathartic, a necessary step in the process of “moving on”.

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......

[damntexdem]

1. We are NOT a nation at war!

That's the problem I have with this headline and many other statements about the U.S. We are a nation with a president at war, a nation that has sent some of its military to war.

Far from being a nation at war, we're a nation that has already been taken over by the enemy.