Originally posted by Raider179
I can't draw a parallel bewteen you going on missionary work and a soldier dying in service of America. I can't and won't.
The two are not even close to the same. Why not just use the actual scenario, the facts are well known enough, no need for analogies.
say you went off to war and got killed and your mother did what Cindy is doing. She is a mother with a Son who died in a war. Why is it all you guys try to do is make her look like some twisted person? maybe she is out there, but I would think the death of a child would allow people some leeway, but I guess not.
So what if she is making a political issue out of it???
But I get the feeling that some of you seem to have insight into her grief and feel she is "faking it" to make Bush look bad. Now if her son turns up alive or something then maybe you will have a leg to stand on but until then, I only see a greiving mother.
Raider, I used the parallel in an attempt to do a number of things:
1) To show the volunteer nature of the actions in both cases, and how it is possible to die doing what is right and yet have a relative profoundly disagree, be grieved, and use it for purposes at odds with the apparent desires of the person in question.
2) To take the ultra-inflammatory Bush/Iraq elements out of the story and show that my concern lies in the fact that I believe this is wrong regardless of the politics of the thing.
Am I really the only one who thinks that her primary duty should have been to her living kids and to working to preserve the covenant bond between she and her husband? I don't doubt her grief, its just this is a selfish, wrong, and self-destructive way of expressing it. If I desired to sacrifice my kids and my marriage so I could get a second opportunity to scream invectives at the man whom I had translated my grief into hate towards, I would hope that someone on this board would care enough to say, "For heaven's sake man, don't do this." instead of saying "Hey, that's your right dude."
Sheehan's fanatical and single minded pursuit of this cause is reminiscent of what Paul Johnson wrote of in
"Intellectuals" and their willingness to disregard the lives and concerns of living loved ones in order to pursue an idealized political goal. "Everything is subservient to the cause." The moment a mother ignores the call
"Come home, we need you" from her living children in order to pursue a political goal, is the moment I have to say, thats fundamentally wrong.
- SEAGOON
