There was a note in today’s news that a prominent voice of protest against the Iraq war, Cindy Sheehan, was giving up her efforts. According to the online article I read, she wrote in her blog, "Good-bye America ... you are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can't make you be that country unless you want it. It's up to you now."
She stated further that her son, Casey, whose death in the war sparked her protest, “died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives."
Her protest, originally focused on President Bush and the Republican Party, expanded to include the Democrats, as well. “I guess no one paid attention to me when I said that the issue of peace and people dying for no reason is not a matter of 'right or left', but 'right and wrong,” she wrote. It sounds to me like she became disillusioned.
The late William Sloane Coffin put it well: “How can you become disillusioned unless you had illusions to begin with?”
Placing one’s hope for lasting peace in a political leader, party, movement or system is to have an illusion. Ultimately, the illusion will prove false, because the “peace” promoted will emerge from self-serving motivation and self-enhancing approaches.
Don’t get me wrong. I want the violence to stop and I will vote for people who seem to have a way to make it happen. But don’t tell me that will be peace. As long as billions of people try to survive on $2 or less per day, we don’t have peace. As long as 20% of the world’s population consumes 80% of the world’s resources, peace is elusive.
To me, peace isn’t a political or military arrangement that somehow stops people from killing each other. Rather, I think it is a way of life that may be too demanding for most of us willingly to embrace.