Stone Cupid Real

Here is the flashpoint for the resurgence of an anti-war movement. Thank you, Cindy. You are very brave.
Camp Casey updates and videos 24/7 on Truthout.org
"I have a broken heart. And I shouldn't have a broken heart."--Cindy Sheehan to George W. Bush
TODAY (August 17th) IN THE NEW YORK TIMES... Doesn't it seem with all of W's neighbor's complaining, he could just do the neighborly thing and TALK TO CINDY??? No, because he will never be able to look her in the eye.
Here is her letter from California, TODAY, Saturday, August 20th. She's with her mom, who's had a stroke.

This image is not Cindy Sheehan, This is another protester at Camp Casey in Crawford, picking up the pieces from Monday night's attack on Arlington West... And here's a letter up on Truthout TODAY, Saturday, August 20, from a retired Sergeant who lost two soldiers in Iraq to the Texan who mowed those crosses down...
You Mowed Down His Cross
By Perry Jefferies, First Sergeant, USA (retired)
t r u t h o u t | Letter

Thursday 18 August 2005

Mr. Northern:

I am a Veteran of the Iraq war, having served with the 4th Infantry Division on the initial invasion with Force Package One.

While I was in Iraq, a very good friend of mine, Christopher Cutchall, was killed in an un-armored HMMWV outside of Baghdad. He was a cavalry scout serving with the 3d ID. Once he had declined the award of a medal because Soldiers assigned to him did not receive similar awards that he had recommended. He left two sons and a wonderful wife. On Monday night, August 16, you ran down the memorial cross erected for him by Arlington West.

One of my Soldiers in Iraq was Roger Turner. We gave him a hard time because he always wore all of his protective equipment, including three pairs of glasses or goggles. He did this because he wanted to make sure that he returned home to his family. He rode a bicycle to work every day to make sure that he was able to save enough money on his Army salary to send his son to college. At Camp Anaconda, where the squadron briefly stayed, a rocket landed inside a tent, sending a piece of debris or fragment into him and killed him. On Monday night, August 16, you ran down the memorial cross erected for him by Arlington West.

One of my Soldiers was Henry Bacon. He was one of the finest men I ever met. He was in perfect shape for a man over forty, working hard at night. He told me that he did that because he didn't have much money to buy nice things for his wife, who he loved so much, so he had to be in good shape for her. He was like a father to many young men in his section of maintenance mechanics. They fixed our vehicles with almost no support and fabricated parts and made repairs that kept our squadron rolling on the longest, fastest armor advance ever made under fire. He was so very proud of his son-in-law that married the beautiful daughter so well raised by Henry. His son-in-law was a helicopter pilot with the 1st Cavalry Division, who died last year. Henry stopped to rescue a vehicle belonging to another unit on what was to be his last day in Iraq. He could have kept rolling - he was headed to Kuwait after a year's tour. But he stopped. He could have sent others to do the work, but he was on the ground, leading by example, when he was killed. On Monday night, August 16, you took it upon yourself to go out in the country, where a peaceful group was exercising their constitutional rights, and harming no one, and you ran down the memorial cross erected for Henry and for his son-in-law by Arlington West.

Mr. Northern - I know little about Cindy Sheehan except that she is a grieving mother, a gentle soul, and wants to bring harm to no one. I know little about you except that you found your way to Crawford on Monday night in August with chains and a pipe attached to your truck for the sole purpose of dishonoring a memorial erected for my friends and lost Soldiers and hundreds of others that served this nation when they were called. I find it disheartening that good men like these have died so that people like you can threaten a mother who lost a child with your actions. I hope that you are ashamed of yourself.

Perry Jefferies, First Sergeant, USA (retired)

See also another entry about Cindy and her son on this blog, thanks to Will Pitt,
here:
The subject of PTSD is very compelling to me in this war, and in these times. That day in March I had searched PTSD and gotten a few hits. I did another search today on truthout google for PTSD, and got 55 hits.
By the way, the title of that entry was "These Boys Are in Pain". And I wrote a song for my new album called "Boy in Pain", and it began because a friend of my son was struggling. March 20th, I found just now, held
THIS ARTICLE in the Chicago Tribune, reprinted in Truthout, about FEMALE SOLDIERS coming home with TWICE the levels of PTSD. Girls in Pain, too. And it's hard to get sympathy (and treatment) when you wear your pain on the inside...

I found all this great stuff at my daily digest here at truthout.org


Making the Most of Mother's Day
This great piece by Rebecca Ephraim from Alternet includes great reminders about a stellar daughter, Marla Ruzicka, and why Mother's Day (for Peace) was created by Julia Ward Howe in the 1870's after our own Civil War:

Making the Most of Mother's Day
By Rebecca Ephraim AlterNet Saturday 07 May 2005.

This Mother's Day, why not follow in the tradition that Julia Ward Howe set and Marla Ruzicka exemplified.
I grudgingly admit that the big things I wanted when I was a young adult were fame and fortune.
Yes, I can rationalize that I wasn't alone in my youthful lust for more, more, more for me, me, me.
But then there's the audacious northern Californian, Marla Ruzicka, whose stirring death in Iraq last month,
at age 28, was an elegant reminder of how stuck we can be in our boundless self-interests.

It's as if her bigger-than-life role as a long-time advocate for the victims of war was a giant finger poking
at the tightly woven cocoon many of us have spun (consciously or not) that insulates us from acknowledging the ravages of armed struggle on the lives of ordinary people in other lands. Yes, she did the heavy lifting for a lot of us.

Ruzicka, by dint of personality and pluck, sought out politicians (for aid money), U.S. soldiers (for clearing
landmines) and the media (to cover the plight of civilian Iraqis) so she could assist displaced families and orphaned children who were either bombed by mistake or simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ironically, this woman who had made helping victims of war her life's work was "collateral damage" herself when a car bomb meant for another target, killed her and two others on April 16. She was on her way to help an Iraqi child. I recall I was on my way to the mall.

It was a stunning realization that this smart and pretty blonde -- 20 years my junior -- had done more at her age, as Vermont's U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy put it, "than most people do in a lifetime."

Yes, Marla Ruzicka was a daughter any mom could be proud of. "She cared about people and gave people her love and help," her own mother, Nancy, was quoted as saying following her daughter's death. "I'll remember the love she spread around the world and the good ambassador that she was for her country."

In one sense -- and not as tacky as it sounds -- Marla Ruzicka's death comes just in time for Mother's Day. Her acts of compassion in war-torn countries renew the importance that Julia Ward Howe gave to the act of honoring mothers in the late 1800's. You could say Mother's Day was her brainchild; but flowers and chocolates didn't figure in.

Julia Ward Howe is probably best known for writing the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Yet, like Marla Ruzicka, Howe witnessed first-hand the carnage and suffering of war -- for her, the Civil War, taking place on our own shores. She was shocked by the staggering deaths, injuries and disease among the soldiers, the devastating toll it took upon the widows and orphans she worked with and the ensuing economic crises that followed the war.

It was from this seminal experience that in 1870, Howe composed a Mother's Day Proclamation calling on women to
rise up and "solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace. Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God."

This Mother's Day, why not follow in the tradition that Julia Ward Howe set and Marla Ruzicka exemplified. Both embraced the great human family, drawing no distinctions between "them" and "us." Let's honor the valued women in our lives by making peace a priority, whether it's making peace at home or a half a world away. Even better, as you sit with your family this Mother's Day, read Howe's original Proclamation aloud knowing that we all can't soar with eagles -- but we can carve the turkey and aspire to doing a little more to make the world a better place.

Did you get what you wanted on Mother's Day?
Wow. These women are up to something: www.wand.org
This one came into view after Mother's Day, but it sure fits the bill...

A Mothers' War

By Cynthia Gorney

The New York Times

Sunday 29 May 2005

    Go to Original

They were talking about military burial benefits as the waitress took the salad plates away, and one of them had come up with something perversely humorous even on this subject, so they had been laughing. Now there was a brief, comfortable silence. They had one of the back rooms at Boone Tavern in downtown Columbia, Mo., where they usually go. It was a Friday night in February, and because one woman had other plans, there were only five of them, which made the big, round table seem too large. Instead of spacing themselves around it, they had taken seats along one side, closer to one another.
    Patricia said, "I had a doorbell moment this week."  Tracy Della Vecchia looked up quickly and watched Patricia's face. Tracy's son had gone to high school with Patricia's son, so Tracy and Patricia knew of each other during the years when all the teenagers would hole up drinking beer in the barn on Tracy's property. But now their sons were 22 and in the same Marine unit in Iraq, and Tracy knows things about Patricia that she has never known about another person before. Tracy knows that clipped to Patricia's refrigerator is a list of things to remember in case the telephone rings in the middle of the night and it's Patricia's son calling from a camp somewhere just to talk. Tracy knows that the grandfather clock in Patricia's house chimes nine times when the other clocks say it's noon because the grandfather clock is set to Baghdad time. Tracy knows that Patricia has figured out how to tell if someone is in her driveway by squinting at the reflection off a certain glass-covered picture in the dining room, so that if it should ever be two men in uniform, Patricia will know they have arrived before they start ringing the bell and before she is obliged to look directly at them and hear what they have come to say.  "It was last night," said Patricia, who asked that her last name not be used. "Around 8 p.m. I was home by myself. I was not expecting the doorbell." Patricia said she finally saw that it was an older gentleman, alone. "Probably canvassing for leukemia or something," she said. She said she never did open the door for him, and the other women said, no, of course not, and Tracy told the story about the blue car at dawn. She was telling it for my benefit; the others nodded as she spoke, like church women hearing a familiar passage of
Scripture. "This was Derrick's first deployment, 2003, right after the war
started," Tracy said. "I was a basket case. Five-thirty in the morning, I'm not sleeping anyway, I go downstairs and make coffee. You've seen my house -- nobody ever comes down my driveway. But a car comes down my driveway. A Lincoln Town Car." "Crown Victoria," Sharon Curry said. "Sorry," Tracy said. "A dark blue Crown Vic. Thank you, Sharon. And it's got these little antennas. And I'm sure someone's coming to tell me my son has died. I'm sure of it. And I literally fall down on my knees. I'm saying to myself, You've got to answer the door, you've got to answer the door. I'm yelling for my husband, but nothing's coming out of my mouth. I'm crawling toward the door. The car turns around the driveway circle. It stops for a minute. I think: O.K.
He's going to get out. He's going to come tell me now. And -- he drives away. I come busting out the door. 'Wait! Wait!' But he didn't. So I call 911: 'There's somebody at my door! My son's in Iraq!' Turns out it's the fire district. There was smoke coming from someplace. They were going up and down driveways trying to find out where it was from."

Tracy has a wide, beautiful face, with pale skin and thick black hair that curls down her back, and her expression was complicated, at once anguished and amused, in a way I was beginning to recognize. She lives and works on 15 acres outside town in a two-story house, where she runs a Web site called marineparents.com, which she built after she understood that her 19-year-old son, who enlisted two years earlier in the Marines, was going to be sent to war. The Web site has sprouted message boards, chat rooms and multiple layers of explanatory information, turning it into a national gathering place for adults whose sole connection is their role as parents of marines. Tracy tries to devote part of each day to her Web-design business, but most of her waking hours are now spent attending to marineparents.com, hunched in a silent office before a computer in which pride and grief and bewilderment and rage seem to be crashing around all the time, so that sometimes Tracy just pushes back from the desk and walks outside to smoke a cigarette and look at her pond. She signs her e-mail messages "semper fi." She is 43 and once thought she would become a hippie. When her son was small and received toy guns as presents, she threw them into the trash.
    That son, Derrick Jensen, has spent three birthdays in a row deployed in Iraq. There are about 140,000 American troops stationed in Iraq; 23,000 of them are marines. As this article appears, Corporal Jensen should be somewhere near Falluja. He is an infantry radio operator, which sounded to Tracy like a good, safe job until she found out that radio operators carry big antennas, which make them easier targets. She let me stay at her house for a while this winter partly because I am a reporter and happen to have a 22-year-old son who is not in the military. Tracy thought people like me might want to know something about what it's like to live all the time with that kind of information about your child, to go to sleep knowing it and wake up knowing it and drive around town knowing it, which makes it possible to be standing in the Wal-Mart dog-food aisle on
an ordinary afternoon and without reason or warning be knocked breathless again by the sudden imagining of sniper fire or an explosion beneath a Humvee. Still. Derrick has been shipped home twice since President Bush delivered his May 2003 speech in front of the "Mission Accomplished" banner on the deck of an aircraft carrier, and shipped back twice. He has had one occasion of near death that Tracy knows about in some detail; there are others, she assumes, that Derrick has so far kept to himself. "During the first deployment," Tracy said to me
once as we were sitting in her car, a lipstick-red PT Cruiser with a yellow "Keep My Son Safe" ribbon magnet on the back, "the only emotion I could imagine him having was fear." Tracy's closest friends in the world right now are other parents whose sons and daughters have served in Iraq or are serving there now.
Some of these parents think the war is righteous, some think it was wrongheaded from the outset and some, like Tracy, have made fierce internal bargains with themselves about what they will and will not think about as long as their children and their children's comrades remain in uniform and in harm's way.

The women Tracy meets every week for dinner, each of whom has a son in the Marines or the Army, have a "no politics" rule around their table; this was one of two things I remember Tracy telling me the first time she took me to a gathering of the mothers. The other thing was that draped over a banister in Tracy's house was an unwashed T-shirt Derrick had dropped during his last visit home. I thought Tracy was apologizing for her housekeeping, which I had already seen was much better than mine, but she cleared her throat and said that what I needed to understand was that she hadn't washed the T-shirt because if the Marine Corps has to send you your deceased child's personal effects, it launders the clothing first. "That means there's no smell," Tracy said. She let this hover between us for a minute. "I've heard from so many parents who were crushed when they opened that bag, because they had thought they'd be able to smell their son," Tracy said.
    
One morning in February, Tracy got up at 4:30, made coffee, filled a commuter mug and climbed into her car with a suitcase to drive east to St. Louis. The highway was nearly deserted, an occasional McDonald's or Super 8 Motel sign looming in the darkness. Tracy hadn't slept well; she had been brooding for days about what she was on her way to do. "Luigi keeps telling me, 'Breathe,"' she said. Luigi is Tracy's husband. He is Italian and moved to Missouri from Naples four years ago, after he and Tracy met while teamed up on a Web-design project. Tracy divorced Derrick's father a couple of years before that and had been raising Derrick and his younger sister by herself, on the Columbia property, when Derrick marked his 17th birthday by signing up for the Marines.
    He left for boot camp in the summer of 2001, two months after his high-school graduation....Read the rest HERE

Link to Code Pink's Mother's Day
Proclamation for Peace

codepink.org

And finally,
a magnificent treatise on HOW TO BE AN ACTIVIST MOM and why it is so important NOW,
by Dolores Huerta, co-founder with Cesar Chavez of the United Farm Workers. She is the mother of 11 children.

Save the Arctic Wildlife Refuge!

Dahr Jamail writing about positive steps toward healing loss in Iraq. A journey of a thousand miles.....

You can check in almost daily with what this amazing man writes from Iraq...

Following are some of the agencies accepting contributions
for aid to people affected by the earthquake and tsunami in
Asia.

OXFAM AMERICA
Donor Services Department
26 West Street
Boston, MA
12111-1206
800-77-OXFAM


DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS
P.O. Box 1856
Merrifield, Va.
22116-8056
888-392-0392


INTERNATIONAL FEDERATION OF RED CROSS/RED CRESCENT


INTERNATIONAL MEDICAL CORPS
Earthquake/Tsunami Relief
1919 Santa Monica Boulevard,
Suite 300
Santa Monica, Calif. 90404
800-481-4462

ACTION AGAINST HUNGER
247 West 37th Street, Suite 1201
New York, N.Y. 10018
212-967-7800 x108

AMERICAN FRIENDS SERVICE COMMITTEE
AFSC Crisis Fund
1501 Cherry Street
Philadelphia, Pa. 19102
215-241-7000

ISLAMIC RELIEF USA
Southeast Asia Earthquake Emergency
P.O. Box 6098
Burbank, Calif. 91510
888-479-4968

AMERICAN JEWISH WORLD SERVICE
45 West 36th Street, 10th Floor
New York, N.Y. 10018
800-889-7146

DIRECT RELIEF INTERNATIONAL
27 South La Patera Lane
Santa Barbara, Calif. 93117
805-964-4767

MERCY CORPS
Southeast Asia Earthquake Response
Dept. W
P.O. Box 2669
Portland, Ore. 97208
800-852-2100

INTERNATIONAL ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN
CHARITIES
Asia Disaster Response
P.O. Box 630225
Baltimore, MD 21263-0225
877-803-4622

OPERATION USA
8320 Melrose Avenue, Suite 200
Los Angles,
Calif. 90069
800-678-7255

SAVE THE CHILDREN
Asia Earthquake/Tidal Wave Relief Fund
54 Wilton Road
Westport, Conn. 06880
800-728-3843

( I checked the gushy corporate donor page against "choosetheblue.org"
and it looks to be as much blue as red. Let's hope the corporate
partners give a lot, too...)
I actually went to the web pages of all the charities listed in the New
York Times and left off some that looked too partisan, and American Red
Cross and a couple others that have been in the news as being shady.
If you'd care to see that full list, you can go here:
NEW YORK TIMES

Have a safe and strong new year.