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Forget Hillary, I want Elizabeth Edwards to run for President.
I grew up in a military family. My father and my grandfather were career Navy pilots. I saw what it meant to live a life every single day when the possibility of an honorable death is always there, at the dinner table, on the playground, at the base school. Will someone's father not come home tonight? And I didn't just feel the possibility, I saw the real thing, and, believe me, it stays with you, it changes you.:I also saw, then and more recently as I campaigned across this country and spent time with courageous military mothers and wives, how little attention is paid to the needs and the voices of military families. It has to change. The sacrifices that our military men and women make assure us that we have the strongest military in the world, but the sacrifices that their families make are too often ignored. The President's cavalier dismissal of Cindy Sheehan is emblematic of a greater problem. This is a mother who raised her son to love his country enough to serve. This is a mother who lived the impossible life of a mother of a soldier serving in Iraq, unable to sleep when he sleeps, unable to sleep when he is on duty, unable to watch the television, unable to stop watching the television.
And when the worst does happen, when the world comes crashing down and she puts the boy she bore, the boy she taught, the boy she loved in the ground, what does that government say to her? It says we'll do the talking; we don't need to hear from you. If we are decent and compassionate, if we know the lessons we taught our children, or if, selfishly, all we want is the long line of the brave to protect us in the future, we should listen to the mothers now.
Listen to Cindy.
I didn't grow up in a military family, but many, many members of my friends and family have served. Fortunately, most of them did not face life in the free fire zone, though one brother is still active in the Navy.
But we've known senseless death anyway, me and mine. From the baby who died of SIDS three short months into life, to the teenager who didn't want to wrinkle her dress so kept her seatbelt loose and was thrown from the car in an accident, to the wasting away of life that saps the very spark of life from a formerly lively, engaged man who by the end was a shadow of himself, unable to even control the most basic of bodily functions we've had to make sense of the incomprehensible actions of the universe.
Eventually, we do go on with our lives. There's a person-shaped hole right in the middle of it, but we do go on.
Then again, none of my loved ones were lied into their graves
Support the troops. Tell the truth. Bring them home.
Update: Brian Keeler of E Pluribus Media has just posted the third in his dazzling series of dispatches from Crawford. I have to add this quote from Rev Bob Edgars:
saw my friend recently and asked him how he was doing, and he said, `I
wish I had had this tragic death earlier in my ministry. You see, I
always thought death would heal in a month or two, but even now,
everywhere I go and everything I do, I am reminded of my son. How am I
doing? I'm a better minister now, because I know the wound never
completely heals.'"
No, the wound never completely heals. But we go on anyway.
There's been some stellar reporting coming out of the blogosphere on Camp Casey. It's hard to pick a best of breed. Between Brian's coverage, Truthout's vigilant reporting, and MilitaryTracy at Booman's wonderfully evocative stream of consciousness reporting, it's almost like being there.
Though not quite, which is why I'm going to try to head up there next week if things work out.