Everything is making me cry. Not having a place to live, being accused of something bizarre by my daughter-in-law (wife of my Navy son, soon to deploy), 3,455 dead American soldiers in Iraq and then Afghanistan . . . that's as far as I got yesterday--the list in the Baltimore Sun.
Because the front page was a beautiful picture of two beautiful young people getting married, and the whole romance of it was that the groom had just graduated from Annapolis and was looking forward to his military career. In the corner, news of a local man and father of five just killed by an IED in Anbar Province. The list was on the editorial page, you know. And now Cindy Sheehan is burnt out and I'm wondering if I am too, because I just cry all the time.
I still cry about Vietnam. I cry about babies hung by their necks by their mother in a closet in Texas, and beautiful Iraqi children and beautiful African children, and beautiful American children now grown up, and all of them with reasons to cry, or turned into shreds of flesh thousands of miles away.
The colder comments about Cindy Sheehan's decision make me wonder if I'm crying for the work and passion and caring I've invested as a tiny cell in the organism of anti-war, or just for myself. Or for the people in my family that say I'm failing my son and my country with what I do and write, because that they are so heart-cold to take for granted that other people's children die over and over for the greed and egos of strangers. I can't figure out if they just have to turn themselves off and into the patriots they think they are to keep from crying with me. Or--yeah, for myself.
I cry for the boys in Vietnam that never came back, and the ones that did--or am I just imagining myself as one of their mothers, still bleeding from the heart?
Maybe I've got an overactive imagination, visualizing the families that could have been but never will be and the wonders that could have been created with the resources that were poured into death and destruction. It's an alternate world with no nightmare memories of combat, no decades-old pain, and no new pain being created moment by moment, night and day.
This diary is self-indulgent. It won't enlighten anything. It hasn't enlightened me to write it. There's just so much wrong out there and I have to stop crying some day and get on with things, and maybe I can dump this baggage in a Kos diary to move faster. That's the only alternative to being sucked down by the weight. Cindy's got tons; I hope she finds some place to put it.