I am a Mom. Like most people, I have a Mom. There are Moms in every part of this country. Moms love their kids, and will protect their children. Cindy Sheehan is a Mom and she lost her child. We don't know exactly how she feels, but as mothers, we can try to show her compassion. Cindy Sheehan isn't a politician, but she is a very brave mother.
Because there are so many mothers in this country, they are starting to evaluate the human costs of war. In the end, President Bush will need to answer the questions posed by mothers: What was the noble cause of the Iraq war? What is your exit plan? Why are so many of our young men and women dying? Why are these troops sent to war with unarmored humvees and poor/no body armor? Why are there American companies becoming war profiteers?
Mothers are concerned. The city editor of a newspaper has written about his mother and her change in attitude.
http://hollisterfreelance.com/opinion/contentview.asp?c=167045 Here's an excerpt from the article:
For the last year or more my mother has been gradually expressing ever greater exasperation with President Bush, the war, and the religious right. “Have you heard about this James Dobson guy?” she asked me on the phone, referring to the head of Focus on the Family. “If they overturn Roe vs. Wade, that’ll be it for me,” she said.
Then she mentioned Cindy Sheehan.
For all the efforts to discredit Ms. Sheehan, what she accomplished in drawing attention to the human cost of the war, if my mother’s opinion is any indication, crossed party lines. There’s a Mom Faction in American politics, and while it isn’t a monolithic Third Rail, it’s at least and second-and-a-half rail. When their children are dying on a battlefield of choice, you touch it at your peril.
My mother has her fingers on the pulse, and scalps, of many such women. She’s a hairdresser with a clientele that has been coming to her regularly for decades. Now grandmothers, these women were moms during Vietnam, in which over 50,000 American sons and daughters died. They worried then about their kids’ safety, now they’re worried about grandkids - theirs or someone else’s. Most are pretty mainstream, most Republican, and most, my mother tells me, pretty much fed up with George Bush.
