Cindy Sheehan has decided it’s time to take back her life, or more aptly put, get on with it. I can’t say that I would disagree with her on that. She’s fought the good fight, been the front of the anti-war movement after the loss of her son Casey in Iraq and now it’s time to go in peace and find some peace in her heart.

Sheehan has “endured a lot of smear and hatred since Casey was killed” and she “became the so-called “Face” of the American anti-war movement,” as she says in her diary bidding the anit-war movement good-bye. The smear has come from the right wing and the left and now she’s had enough. Enough of the anti-war movement and enough of the two party system that many other Cindy Sheehan are disenchanted with…

I have come to some heartbreaking conclusions this Memorial Day Morning. These are not spur of the moment reflections, but things I have been meditating on for about a year now. The conclusions that I have slowly and very reluctantly come to are very heartbreaking to me.

The first conclusion is that I was the darling of the so-called left as long as I limited my protests to George Bush and the Republican Party. Of course, I was slandered and libeled by the right as a “tool” of the Democratic Party. This label was to marginalize me and my message. How could a woman have an original thought, or be working outside of our “two-party” system?

In her heart Cindy Sheehan knows that her son, “Casey did indeed die for nothing.”

His precious lifeblood drained out in a country far away from his family who loves him, killed by his own country which is beholden to and run by a war machine that even controls what we think. I have tried every since he died to make his sacrifice meaningful. Casey 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. It is so painful to me to know that I bought into this system for so many years and Casey paid the price for that allegiance. I failed my boy and that hurts the most.

I have also tried to work within a peace movement that often puts personal egos above peace and human life. This group won’t work with that group; he won’t attend an event if she is going to be there; and why does Cindy Sheehan get all the attention anyway? It is hard to work for peace when the very movement that is named after it has so many divisions.

Our brave young men and women in Iraq have been abandoned there indefinitely by their cowardly leaders who move them around like pawns on a chessboard of destruction and the people of Iraq have been doomed to death and fates worse than death by people worried more about elections than people. However, in five, ten, or fifteen years, our troops will come limping home in another abject defeat and ten or twenty years from then, our children’s children will be seeing their loved ones die for no reason, because their grandparents also bought into this corrupt system. George Bush will never be impeached because if the Democrats dig too deeply, they may unearth a few skeletons in their own graves and the system will perpetuate itself in perpetuity.

I am going to take whatever I have left and go home. I am going to go home and be a mother to my surviving children and try to regain some of what I have lost. I will try to maintain and nurture some very positive relationships that I have found in the journey that I was forced into when Casey died and try to repair some of the ones that have fallen apart since I began this single-minded crusade to try and change a paradigm that is now, I am afraid, carved in immovable, unbendable and rigidly mendacious marble.

Camp Casey has served its purpose. It’s for sale. Anyone want to buy five beautiful acres in Crawford , Texas ? I will consider any reasonable offer. I hear George Bush will be moving out soon, too…which makes the property even more valuable.

This is my resignation letter as the “face” of the American anti-war movement. This is not my “Checkers” moment, because I will never give up trying to help people in the world who are harmed by the empire of the good old US of A, but I am finished working in, or outside of this system. This system forcefully resists being helped and eats up the people who try to help it. I am getting out before it totally consumes me or anymore people that I love and the rest of my resources.

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.

Good luck to Cindy Sheehan and Thank You for all you have done. You did indeed put a face on the anti-war movement and yes, if people want change bad enough more will get involved. If not we will stagnate and continue to be under the thumb of government out of control. It’s sad and it’s true and many days, I too wrestle with the time and energy put into the fight and ask why am I here.

Members of our troops too, ask while serving in Irar, “Why I am Here?”

It’s time to bring our troops home. It’s time for Americans to wake up to the need for a fundamental change in our government. I look around at the field of Democratic candidates and I can’t get excited. The best leaders in our party aren’t running. What to do? A wish and prayer won’t get us far these days.

Wake Up America.

Bloggers are weighing in on both sides of the aisle… Memeorandum has all the buzz here. Notable posts on the left include TalkLeft, GunTotingLiberal, My Left Wing, Liberty Street, and Corrente Wire. The usual wingnuttery is out en force: Crittenden, Don Surber, Tiger Hawk chime in, to name a few.

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