Tag Archives: Cindy Sheehan

Oh, Lord, not Kumbaya!

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Campfire songsMy muse is upset because everyone is making fun of Kumbaya.
 
Relax, Kumbaya is safe. The story you read in the Gazette, Oh Lord, not Kumbaya, syndicated from the Dallas Morning Herald, is a rather underhanded loaded question. You know the classic example: “When did you stop beating your wife?” Whether you never stopped or never started, the load is delivered, you do. (But you don’t.)

The DMH article asked “How did Kumbaya become such a joke?” and then lists instances of the joke being made: A GOP ad, a Christian Science Monitor quip. They are able to find an early instance in an obscure 80’s comedy Volunteers spoofing the Peace Corps. It seems to me SNL has made fun of everything, that wouldn’t make the ridicule universal.

I was tipped off when my friend paraphrased the article as having said Kumbaya was an “international joke.” What international? The rest of the world isn’t making fun of our spirituals, certainly not our peaceniks. The lambast is purely English-speaking and it’s coming from corporate mouthpieces who want to ridicule any tools of grassroots community efforts.

Television has no interest in sing-a-long songs. People singing together and not looking at the TV doesn’t serve them at all. But for people communing together, a melody and lyric like Kumbaya is very powerful, especially because everybody knows it already. When protestors assembled with Cindy Sheehan last year in Crawford, we sang Kumbaya among others. We wound up singing all the patriotic songs too because they were the only ones we all knew.

And so the media is determined to keep the heat on hippies and idealists, religious or not, by making fun of them, and concluding that the derision is universal. The press laughs with each other’s jokes and then report the humor to be statistically unanimous.

The Dallas reporter asked several etymologists “why did Kumbaya become an idiom for idiocy?” And none of the etymologists knew. Maybe that’s a tip off it isn’t.

Hopefully one day the press will stop trying to paint people who hope for peace and goodwill to all mankind as idiots.

Sheehan power

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Cindy Sheehan has no peer in the world. She can travel to any country and be received by their governments as a dignitary. Few celebrities or politicians can expect such treatment, and when they do, their entitlement comes from being plugged into the establishment.
 
Cindy Sheehan’s power comes from the people. It comes from our belief that an outsider could make a difference in the turn of events. The American media could easily have ignored Cindy Sheehan’s stand in Crawford Texas, but Sheehan had captured the public’s fascination. Why? Because she reflected the public’s idealism. As long as the ordinary people of the world believe that there exists someone who could call President Bush to the carpet, Cindy Sheehan will be imbued with her power. Who other than one improbable woman could face off the man who holds the fate of the world in his hands?

This Easter Cindy Sheehan is returning to Crawford Texas to lay siege one more time to President Bush in his lair. Since initiating her movement in August last year, Sheehan has participated in diverse actions, including a Thanksgiving reprise in Crawford which led only to several prompt arrests. The media has learned that as public attention wanes, it can ignore or temper their enthousiasm for Cindy Sheehan when it wants to. Again, Sheehan’s power comes only from us.

Perhaps it is again time to rally to Sheehan’s side. Maybe joining Sheehan’s vigil in Crawford for Easter can once more focus the world’s hope that the peace movement can plant itself before George Bush’s eyes.

We can rally in large numbers all over the world, but because the media can typify the effort as lacking cohesion, it can certainly pretend that the peace movement is peopled by malcontents who offer no alternative.

Cindy Sheehan offers a real alternative, and I think she has hit on an ideal strategy. Not just withdrawal from Iraq, but an appeal to Bush’s conscience. He may have one.

Cindy Sheehan, taking the fun out of war!

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Cindy Sheehan dons our Camp Casey Colorado Springs cap.
Kelly, Pallas and Cindy.
 
Camp Casey Colorado Springs own Pallas Stanford and IVAW co-founder Kelly Dougherty marched with Cindy Sheehan from Mobile to New Orleans. Also marching from Colorado Springs were veterans Joe Hatcher, Jeff Peskoff, Ethan Crowell, Alan Skinner, and Vietnam Veterans Against the War co-founder Terry Leichner.

The March 14-19 Vets Gulf March marked the third anniversary of the war in Iraq and was meant to highlight the relationship between the misappropriation of resources for the illegal war and the woeful assistance given to the Katrina Hurricane victims. The Colorado Springs delegation left from Camp Casey on March 12.

Cindy Sheehan had sent her greetings through Andy Braunstein when he was in DC, now she’s got our peace cap. The TAKING THE FUN OUT OF WAR cap from Colorado Springs’ ragtag peace camp!

Giving Catholicism its due

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I might never have imagined myself saying this, being somewhat agnostic in my practices, certainly atheist in my personal dialogs.

I had a Catholic upbringing, even some years at Catholic schools. I’ve railed against the dogma of organized religion, the counter-intuitive belief system that seemed always to oppose scientific philosophy.

I’ve felt victimized by the guilty self-restraint which tempers a Catholic’s view of pleasure. Sex for example seemed all the more exciting for what it shouldn’t be, as opposed to what it is. The vague admonition that a person should choose a mate within their faith took on real meaning for me when I discovered myself drawn to similarly prudish partners, Catholic.

Dirty laundry aside, in the civic and philanthropic realm, I am encountering a great number of Catholics, disproportionate to the other more predominant American religions. Why is this?

It’s true that many of these Catholics are no longer practicing, in fact many are rebelling still against their upbringing. In the do-gooder crowd this seems especially true.

From a humanist perspective it is hard not to condemn the Vatican’s stand against prophylactics and its resultant impact upon AIDs ravaged Africa. It’s hard also to regard the church’s patriarchal edicts as anything other than stubborn sexist recalcitrance. In fact when independent-minded people gather to rail against what are felt to be oppressive religious forces, they are most usually recovering Catholics.

Maybe we should give Catholicism its due. The Catholic Church may have launched countless lives into trajectories of self-doubt, but it implanted those lives with a spiritual center. Those brains formed themselves around spiritual ideas which, even if it rejected them, knew that some spiritual idea or other should reside there.

That’s my radical, none to complicated developmental theory.

I hit upon this topic when I read today about Cindy Sheehan having been a Catholic youth minister. Are there quite a few Catholics in the anti-war movement? There certainly are. Would the number seem disproportionate? Frankly, yes. In Colorado Springs, bastion of fundamentalist protestantism, the anti-war community is driven by a majority of Catholic or former Catholic activists.

Why is that? Catholicism can’t lay claim to being more spiritual or more ethical than any other religion. Where are the Protestant voices among the protesters? We need to wake the dormant consciences of that majority of American churchgoers.

Whatever the spiritual practices to which we now cling, ex-Catholics should be thankful for the awakened sense of humanity with which we were imparted.

First they came for Cindy

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Is protest now a crime?

Someone called the police on the CPT vigil.

Just after noon on Thursday, a patrol car pulled into the Toons parking lot. The officer rolled down her window and motioned for someone to come over to speak for the eight vigil keepers assembled near the Nevada Avenue sidewalk.

Apparently someone had called in to a radio station, which in turn called the police, to investigate a report of “protesters at Willamette and Nevada.” We thought: “send them over, they can join our vigil!”

Clearly we were the “protesters” in question, the report was only off by a block, and the officer asked to know what organization we represented and wrote it down in her paperwork. The Christian Peacemakers Team.

We didn’t ask which radio station had made the call. Did someone there think that a “protester” was something you can call the cops about? And what was the crime to which the police thought they were responding? If you called the police to say that a man was mowing his lawn, you’d probably learn that they don’t dispatch officers for activities which are lawful.

Maybe the radio station had been emboldened by Cindy Sheehan’s arrest the night of the state of the union address. Sheehan had unveiled a t-shirt which read ” 2,245 dead. How many more?” Immediately a police officer shouted “protester!” and hurredly removed her from the congressional gallery. Sheehan was released later in the evening, and received an apology from the Washington DC police. Ostensibly their officers had not been sufficiently briefed to know that protesting was not in fact a crime.