When mechanic Casey Sheehan died at 24, in a rain of Bagdad bullets and RPGs on April 4, 2004, his mother Cindy came a little bit more alive.
“After Casey died, I started to really investigate things more fully and I came to the conclusion that part of Casey’s death can be attributed to my ignorance or participation in a system that killed him,” says Sheehan via phone from her new home of San Francisco, before she arrives in Cleveland today for three days of appearances. “I can’t blame the system because it’s not genuine. If I’m asking people to be critical of the system, and then remove themselves, I also have to admit my codependence on that system. It all should be about making amends, trying to make the world a better place.”
She’s done a lot of soul-searching — two books’ worth so far. Another thing that’s clear now: A lot of people disagree on how to make the world a better place.
In the summer of 2005, she set up what became known as Camp Casey in a ditch up the road from Dubya’s Texas ranch, where he’d just begun another long stretch of vacation. She said she’d stay until she talked to the president. “I want to ask the president, ‘Why did you kill my son? What did my son die for?” she told the building press corps. It was four weeks before some top aides came to talk, but the face-to-face with W never came. Thousands of others did, though, in ties and tie-dye. And so she started marching elsewhere with them. They always put her out front.
She wore a T-shirt that said “2,245 DEAD. HOW MANY MORE?” to Bush’s State of the Union speech in early 2006 and was removed by police. Her supporters swelled to the hundreds of thousands. She travelled the world to state her case to mostly supportive throngs; in between, she wrote her books, first Not One More Mother’s Child, then (the recently updated) Myth America: 10 Greatest Myths of the Robber Class and the Case for Revolution.
Both tomes, especially the latest, expose and dispel several myths about what she off-handedly calls our “military-industrial complex/Wall Street/Corporate Media government” — one that increasingly promotes fear, numbness and luxury to control and deplete the herd. Soma, anyone?
This article appears in Jul 1-7, 2009.