JustWonders wrote: ....also think a lot will be forthcoming in the weeks ahead (now that she's leaving Crawford) about what really went on there and who was really behind it....
.....What if, though, hypothetically speaking of course, the public was told that land was donated by a Crawford resident who sympathized with Mrs. Sheehan and her cause, but later found out that that was not the case at all, and that, in fact, a rather large and well known liberal organization had arranged to pay a large sum of money to "lease" that resident's land for the month of August, 2005.
A) She had an offer to use land closer to Bush's ranch and the owner has publicly supported her views. See
here. The owner is a relative of the guy who shoots his rifle off. I'm not sure if Cindy ever moved onto it or not.
B) I knew this would happen. The opponents would try to pick apart every piece of the story to try to discredit the essence of what happened there. If they can find any discrepancy, suspected discrepancy, or sort-of discrepancy, they can go running around proclaiming, "Yes, but you don't know what
really happened there."
What really happened there is that a mother of a son killed in Iraq wanted an audience with president to ask him why. Somewhere along the line she picked up supporters, and she became a symobl of public disenchantment with the Iraq war. That's the essence of what happened.
I might point out again, as I have before, about what happened back in the fifties with Rosa Parks. The story that was given to the papers was that she was a black maid, who took the bus one day and decided that this one time, she was not going to go to the back of the bus. The bus diriver confronted her, and she was taken off the bus. It was one of the critical moments of the civil rights movement.
Well, years later, the full story came out, related by her friends and family. Rosa Parks did not go on that bus in order to get anywhere. She was a member of a civil rights organization, and they had planned to do this a couple of weeks earlier. It was postponed because they felt this date would get more publicity-I forget the specific reason they thought this would be so.
When Rosa Parks got on that bus, she was not expecting anything to happen other than she would be removed from the bus and possibly arrested. That was what she was there for that day. It was planned to happen that way. Nothing made her happier than when that bus driver confronted her. That is what she wanted.
But what difference does it make, now? The fact is that Rosa Parks stood up and sparked a movement. Most people think it is a good thing, and the "revelations" that she really planned the whole thing were met with a shrug, as they were beside the point.
I can just imagine what the Just Wonderses of the day would say if they knew then what we know now about Rosa Parks.
A) "She wasn't really a maid, she was a member of a
civil rights organizaton". True. She was a maid who belonged to a civil rights organization. So what.
Just like Cindy Sheehan is a bereaved mother who also got involved with antiwar people. So what.
B) "Rosa Parks planned the whole thing." Yes, she did. Her and her friends in the civil rights movement. Once again, so what.
Same thing with Cindy. She may have had some involvement in the antiwar movement before her son was killed. So what. There MAY have been some money paid by an antiwar group to secure the land Cindy went on-what difference does it make? Is Cindy's son any less dead for it?
All this concentration on getting to "the real story" simply ignores the fact that the real story was right in front of everyone's nose all along. Cindy Sheehan is a bereaved mother who wanted to know the great cause her son died for, and the president decided he couldn't take half an hour out of his vacation to tell her.
That's the real story.
