cindy sheehan's departure:
It is also clear that Cindy Sheehan, for hopefully a short period of time, has lost hope in the possibilities of change in the USA. She writes, in reference to the reality of US society, that it is “a paradigm that is now, I am afraid, carved in immovable, unbendable and rigidly mendacious marble.” And the end of the letter concludes by saying, “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.”
(...) There are days, or parts of days, where I keep going not because I feel like we have a chance of turning around this destructive “paradigm” but because I feel it’s my duty to keep plugging away. I know that I need to give as much as I can to the struggle for a new world. I believe, I deeply believe, that our purpose on this earth is to try to depart it having done as much as we could to make it a better and more hopeful place for those coming after us.
(...) Not being “organized and united”--this was the other big issue Cindy raised in her letter. She referred to her “work within a peace movement that often puts personal egos above peace and human life. . . It is hard to work for peace when the very movement that is named after it has so many divisions.”