The current issue is always free to all readers

If you need the access available to a
and cannot afford the $50 subscription price, request a complimentary subscrpition here.

Cindy Sheehan’s “An Open Letter to the Democratic Congress,” May 28, 2007, and her letter of resignation from the anti-war campaign, “Good Riddance Attention Whore,” May 28, 2007 are powerful documents in the tradition of resistance.  On the one hand, these letters reveal her personal commitment to the struggle for justice and peace.  She is, after all, the mother of a dead soldier, Casey - and Casey is not with her and his family.  Casey fought in a “war” designed to control oil and oil profits.  As a result, the letters also reveals Cindy’s public commitment to end this imperialist “war.” 

Cindy has decided to leave the anti-war movement and the Democratic Party.  I did not know that she came under attack from Republican and Democrats alike.  I thought about the distance we have covered since the King era; we have democratized silence and fear since the Civil Rights era.  Coerced into some form of silence (infotainment, faulty election ballots, caging votes, shopping til’ you drop, I-Pod addiction, drug addiction, even depression, we hear the voices in our heads say: Resistance is futile.  Dissent equals denigration, alienation - confrontations with the hegemony’s law enforcement. Dissent is un-American! This democratization of silence is a commitment to death - not life!

I did not know that she came under attack from Republican and Democrats alike.  I must say that as a Black American, I knew (and still know) of the potential for attack and ridicule against the women of the Civil Rights Movement.  The Ella Bakers and Fanny Lou Hamers stood up and spoke out as has Cindy on behalf of the idea of democracy.  I know that closed-minded whites did not want to hear from these women and saw them as dangerous for their courage to organize the disenfranchised into a potent force for justice. 

Did they have a choice, really?  Before them, Sojourner Truth bellowed from church pulpits across the North on behalf of the dead and the dying Blacks living out enslavement.  She would have heard the insults from white men regarding her physical attire, her phrasing of the English language, her in-your-face-defiance - from the "dead"! Her intelligence would have come under scrutiny, as the intelligence of Phillis Wheatley required a panel of “distinguished” thinkers, including Thomas Jefferson and Emmanuel Kant, to decide on her mental competence to write poetry. 

I know Ida B. Wells had to step off her porch with a shot gun to run off some hooded “neighbors” standing in front of her home and threatening, as always, to kill her for speaking up against lynching.  Before them all, women did not even need to speak.  They just gathered their children and hauled them and themselves up the side of a slave ship - and tossed the children over and down into the sea. Their duty to protect their children from harm outweighed the goals of sprouting capitalists.  They did not have to utter the word - freedom!

Angela Davis and Assata Shurkur know that there is no such thing as differential treatment for women activists.  Democracy, for these women, came in the form of FBI posters of natural-wearing wild women - WANTED. 

In academia, I can speak along with many of my women colleagues relegated to the slavedom of adjunct teaching for holding perspectives that speak to life, not greed and individual profit. 

Remember Dyan French, known to the community in New Orleans as Mama D and her holding onto life in the face of hurricane winds and swirling governmental indifference. Think on the countless women, mothers struggling to restore life!

Calling Cindy Sheehan a whore and challenging her right to dissent, to speak on behalf of her dead son, to take her personal tragedy and connect with the tragedy of sending our young to war, is reprehensible! How far have we come - and from where? From where? Is this behavior a continuation of the American practice of dehumanizing others? Is this practice, encouraged by rhetoric of the Bush administration and the right-wing really an advancement from conquering Native Americans, enslaving Africans, exploiting the labor of immigrant workers, bombing Black homes and lynching for entertainment, to name a few unpleasant American ugliness?

In these times, like those times of other American crises, we need people to stand up or sit down at the front of the bus.  We need all of the American public in this crisis to confront this military industrial complex, funded by and for politicians (Republicans and Democrats alike) who no longer service the people - if they ever did.  As Cindy Sheehan’s letters reminds us, people like her stood up, shoulder to shoulder to serve the interests of the poor, working-class, immigrant workers, Blacks, Latino(a)s and other disenfranchised groups. It is not just a question of partisan politics; it is about a way of being that stifles life - that says to look at the plight of fellow Americans and take no action.  If there is no empathy, there is no outcry - all the better for the military industrial complex.  

The letters are narratives about a woman, Cindy Sheehan and a young man, Casey Sheehan.  It is about a relationship between mother and son - the loss of a mother and the loss of Casey’s future. In the tradition of women resisting oppression, Cindy has sacrificed everything to put an end to this needless loss - for all of us. 

Stand strong, sista Cindy! To show our love and appreciation to Casey, to you Carly, Andrew, Janie, we should see now that we have looked in the wrong direction when we searched for an opposition party. 

Thank Cynthia McKinney for reminding us that we have been given other words we should hear in our ears, other words that do speak of dissent as an American right, a commitment to life:

“Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice; say that I was a drum major for righteousness.  And all of the other shallow things will not matter.  I won’t have any money to leave behind. I won’t have the fine and luxurious things of life to leave behind.  But I just want to leave a committed life behind.”   (Martin Luther King, Jr. 4 February 1968)

BC Columnist Dr. Jean Daniels writes a column for The City Capital Hues in Madison Wisconsin and is a Lecturer at Madison Area Technical College, MATC. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.