I'm PROUD of my friend Cindy Sheehan

Most people in this country wouldn't have the guts to do what she has done in her grief. I've known Cindy for a long time. She has always been driven to expose the truth so other mothers, like myself, don't have to go through what she has lived.

I look at people who slam my friend as people who have no heart. They are the same people who have allowed this madness to happen and to continue. For all the people who do disagree with Cindy, I guess it's OK with you that there have been so many knock's on the doors of people like Cindy and Carlos Arredondo, and the Cann family. And what has it accomplished? And for what? Our freedom? Our freedom which is taken away everyday with spying, wearing the wrong shirt, getting hit by a hurricane and being left to die - torture OK with you?

IT's NOT OK WITH ME! I stand with my friend Cindy Sheehan on the side of TRUTH and LIFE...precious life people in power choose to blow away so easy for their love of power and money.

REMEMBER - Our Actions have Reactions. Cindy is spreading world peace and trying to undo the damage that has been done to us. I am thankful she gives her time to us.

May Peace Be Inside All Of Us as it is inside Cindy Sheehan


AOL News - 'Peace Mom' Still Campaigning Against War
Peace Mom' Still Campaigning Against War
By MICHELLE LOCKE, AP
SAN FRANCISCO (March 5) - Lunching in the Mission District in a dark skirt, black cardigan and unfussy hairdo, Cindy Sheehan looks every bit the anonymous suburban mom she was not long ago.


Jakub Mosur, AP
As the nation's best-known anti-war campaigner, Cindy Sheehan has drawn praise for her efforts, but others believe she has become a tool of liberal groups.Talk About It: What do you think of Cindy Sheehan? I disapprove of her 61% I admire her 29% Mixed feelings 10% Total Votes: 5,789
That doesn't deter a man who stops at her table to ask for a snapshot and give a word of encouragement as a fellow war protester. "I remember people calling me a leftist," he tells her. "You got to ignore that."
In the months since she captured national attention with her August vigil outside President Bush's Texas ranch, Sheehan has gone from grieving mother to widely recognized anti-war campaigner.
"She somehow managed to step out of the shadows and make her voice heard," says Michael Nagler, a University of California, Berkeley, professor and founder of the campus' Peace and Conflict Studies program.
She also has her share of critics, some charging she's been co-opted by the liberal groups that have helped her.
Her recent meeting with Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's leftist president, raised eyebrows, as have her postings on liberal Web sites like that run by "Fahrenheit 911" filmmaker Michael Moore.
"Cindy Sheehan had one glorious shining moment and she took advantage of it and the peace movement took advantage of her as it created the attention that the movement hadn't had previously," says Stephen Hess, a professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University.
Sheehan, 48, seems to be just about everywhere on her campaign that started with the death of her 24-year-old son, Army Spc. Casey Sheehan, who was killed in Iraq two years ago this April.
She was arrested during Bush's State of the Union address for wearing a T-shirt that referred to the number of troops killed in Iraq then: "2245 Dead. How many more?" Weeks later, she held a San Francisco news conference to announce that she wouldn't challenge Sen. Dianne Feinstein. This month she and REM singer Michael Stipe will headline a New York concert, "Bring 'Em Home Now!" and at Easter it's off to Texas for another vigil outside the Bush ranch.
"She's been a kind of a lightning rod for the anti-war effort and it's because of the essential truth of her position: She's an aggrieved mother; that gives her tremendous power," says Nagler.
Some think Sheehan's overstayed her time in the spotlight.
"If she had just gone home I think she would have been remembered importantly, but she didn't just go home," says Hess.
Her mission has come at a cost. She and her husband, Patrick, split up in the aftermath of their son's death. He has made no public comment
Sheehan insists that no one is exploiting her, saying she has her own agenda.

"I really have to stay focused every day on my mission. That's bringing the troops home. This war's illegal and immoral and my son should be alive and nobody else should be dying," she says.
And she says she doesn't spend time thinking about her critics. "It's the people who say I'm their hero who respect me and what I'm doing - they're the ones who I feel so much pressure to not disappoint."
Still liable to tear up when talking about her son, she says her issue is right and wrong, not left and right. She points out that she hascriticized Democrats, including Feinstein, for their war stance and has no problem supporting Republicans who oppose the war.
She is co-founder of the nonprofit Gold Star Families for Peace, wrote a book "Not One More Mother's Child," and is working on another.

She gets help from groups including CODEPINK, a national woman's peace group, and Veterans for Peace. Her own operation is small - herself, her sister and someone who helps out from time to time answering e-mail.
Bill Mitchell, co-founder of Gold Star Families and a fellow war protester, understands better than most where Sheehan is coming from. His son Mike, an Army sergeant, was killed on the same day as Casey Sheehan.
"I'm amazed at what she has done and how she's taken her position and how she's been out there and making contacts and how she go, go, goes," he says. "Cindy is real. I read some of this stuff that people write about her and they really don't know anything about Cindy."
Mitchell describes himself and Sheehan as "just common, average Americans."
"What we do is keep our pain out there in front of the American public," he says. "I think our lives are very comfortable here; most Americans are not affected by thewar. But there are some of us who have been affected, dramatically affected." *********************************************************************************** America the Pitiful By Charles Sullivan 03/04/06 Calling our form of government a democratic republic does not make it so. We are what we do. By now it should be abundantly clear that most Americans are incapable of recognizing real democracy—because they have never been subjected to one. Perhaps no culture on earth is more materialistic or delusional than ours’. Compared to much of the world, America’s behavior is tragically pathological. We react to planetary warming by driving metal gas guzzling monstrosities, rather than enacting conservation measures. Americans have the habit of doing the opposite of what we should. Our so called leaders think our sensibilities are too delicate to expose us to truth—so reality is omitted from our diet as if it were a plague. Rather than receiving nourishing truth, we are given the opiates of propaganda that affirm and reinforce our odd self destructive behavior. We are held captive by the lies that are deftly woven from the threads of capitalism, and persuaded to act against our own interest, as well as the public good. Propaganda is like a powerful and paralyzing drug that induces the most bizarre social behavior. In the mind it acts like an opiate that provokes psychotic episodes of self harming conduct. We are a nation addicted to oil and violence; a people grateful for our chains of ignorance and servitude to the gods of consumerism and unrestrained capitalism—the very gods that are our undoing. The drip bags of propaganda are permanently attached to our veins to assure that we never awaken from our news-induced coma. Mind control is more subtle than the open use of coercive force in shaping human behaviors. No one is more effectively enslaved than those who think they are free. Witness the glee with which so many naïve and witless conservatives cheer on the neocon cabal in the mistaken belief that their policies do them good. The paradigms of our time, which drive our behaviors, have been deftly marketed to us without our knowledge—subliminal advertising’s finest frenzy. So effective are these media campaigns that few of us even bother to question their authenticity. The result is a virtually comatose culture of consumption and waste that is incapable of defending itself from the predation of wealth and power. Propaganda marginalizes and renders us useless as citizens, by affecting our ability for self examining critical thought. We can no longer add two plus two and get four. In this land of uncommon grace that is blessed with fabulous wealth, mantras are repeated over and over, without regard to validity, until they become ingrained in the public conscience and assume the authority of truth. They become our cultural paradigms, the bedrock of society, whose moral authority is rarely revisited. Centuries of self deception have led us unerringly to the present moment. Everything that contradicts our version of reality is expunged from the public record. Americans do not like to confront unpleasant realities. Let us not hear about the abuse of captives of war. Rather than take action to correct the gross injustices we routinely heap upon the world, as demanded by conscience, we simply deny their existence. We turn our backs on any reality that assaults our conscience and suppress the evidence. We go on as if there were no consequences. Cause and effect is not something we wish to ponder, so we sweep it under the carpet. In a world where other cultures respect human rights and cherish some notion of justice, America’s sociopathic behavior is seen as the belligerent obscenity that it is. Our actions on the world stage are justified by fallacy and drip with a hubris that has no basis in truth. There can be no justice without truth; no peace without justice. If we truly reap what we sow, we are in for some hard times in the years ahead. When our government behaves irresponsibly and with violence toward the world, it is incumbent upon the people to restrain it, to remake that government in the image of the people, rather than the elite. But this is only possible with an aroused and wakeful electorate. Revolution requires an informed and militant citizenry. Awakening is the first step in the long and difficult journey to self liberation. The people will not rise until they awake. If they are to awaken, we must get them off the opiates that make them comatose. We must get them off the commercial news.Progressives and conservatives alike recognize that we have an obscene and belligerent presidency that is buoyed by a frightened and timorous congress. They see that the institutions of government are not servants of the people—they are the servants of their corporate pay masters. Depravity and concentrated wealth hold sway in the halls of government. The White House is a brothel teeming with corporate lobbyists, whose fornications are conducted beyond the pale of public view. Congress is as awash in corporate money as maggots on a corpse. The Bush cabal has to go. However, we must also recognize that the cancer extends well beyond Bush. We must recognize that the system itself is the malignancy. Effective and conscientious citizenship demands more from us than paying taxes and exercising our right to vote. It demands that we act for the common good with conscience and tenacity of purpose. Let us finish the revolution that was begun here in the 1700s. Real democracy cannot be served by paying homage to freedom through garish displays of trinkets—flags and plastic yellow ribbons. These symbols are shallow, superfluous, and disingenuous. Anyone can administer them. To do so requires neither courage nor effort—real patriotism requires an abundance of both. Unlike real patriotism, the symbols of patriotism do not require thought or understanding—they are a conditioned response to the choreographed propaganda that oozes from our televisions and radios, the words that drip from the nation’s daily newspapers. Real patriots do not encourage the champions of Manifest Destiny in their grim work of conquest and empire—they actively oppose them and resist. Those who uphold the Constitution and the Bill of Rights when the government does not are the real patriots. They are America’s dissenters and protesters. They do not require flags and ribbons to demonstrate their patriotism. Their every gesture, their very lives, is an expression of the patriotism that might have made America a different place than it is now—if only there were more of them. Charles Sullivan is a photographer and free lance writer residing in the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia. He welcomes your comments at earthdog@highstream.net.