Abraham Lincoln is supposed to have said on meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, “So this is the little lady who started this big war.” He probably said no such thing but it is a tribute to what one person with talent, energy and courage can do even when it doesn’t look like the circumstances are propitious.
Which makes you wonder if a future President, upon meeting Cindy Sheehan, will exclaim, “So this is the little lady who stopped this big war!” In our time of mass organizations and the mobilization of gigantic amounts of money to get the slightest attention to do anything from selling toothpaste to pushing a presidential candidate, along comes this woman with nothing more than a wounded heart and the rage of loss to make her lone stand.
So thin is the line between eccentricity and genius that in another August, in another year, Cindy Sheehan would have stood on her road watching the shiny cars from the Bush place sweep by and gotten nothing for her pains but mouthfuls of west Texas dust. The hand-painted signs, the look of her little encampment screamed “Not endorsed by the mainstream, possible crackpot.”
They tell us that Cindy Sheehan as an element on the national scene was the product of a bored press corps left undernourished by a tight lipped summer White House. Maybe. And maybe not. Maybe Cindy Sheehan has become who she is because the unendorsed from all over saw themselves in her. Yes, they may have heard about her by watching a dull, no-news day TV broadcast but however they heard of her, they came. They hitched up their campers, their odd looking conveyances, their own hand-painted signs and fueled by war born tears of bitterness, they joined Mr. Lincoln’s Little Lady, the modern version thereof.
In the Pentagon and at the Council on Foreign Relations she can be dismissed for not having an exit strategy, for not taking into account the ramifications. So she is not good at ramifications and exit strategies and in that she is not alone.
What she is good at is awakening people. She is good at reminding a person that powerlessness is no excuse for going along with what is wrong. What she is good at is building a peace movement and being the Little Lady who stopped the Big War.