This essay was originally published on TomDispatch.

Out of the Furnace of War: Cindy Sheehan

It's hard to know whether to regard Cindy Sheehan, the second great American surprise of 2005, as akin to the third, Hurricane Katrina, or to that ivory-billed woodpecker. There had been reliable sightings of Cindy Sheehan all over the left (and even occasionally the mainstream) for many months before she went to Crawford, Texas, but when she pitched her tent in front of the President's vacation home, something happened. There had been other grieving parents taking strong stands against Bush and the war before her. For example, Fernando Suarez de Solar, whose son Jesus died eight days into the war, had spoken and demonstrated in public early on. And there had been plenty of people against the war and plenty of news that it was a bitter, corrosive, corrupting disaster spreading in all directions. But some mysterious constellation of forces--a media sick of its short leash, a slow news month, a bunch of reporters stranded in Crawford, endless bad news from Iraq, a public grown less afraid to ask questions, a blond suburban mom with a broken heart and bold, profanity-laced rhetoric, a lot of antiwar organizations backing her up, including Crawford's Peace House, and a President too craven to meet with a citizen--turned Sheehan into a catalyst for the nation. She and the growing encampment near Crawford became an occasion for large numbers of people to start talking passionately about the war again, to feel that this was a time when we could question policy and maybe force change. She was the antiwar movement's second chance.

A second chance because that movement had died back, fallen out of the media's eye, failed to catalyze effective resistance. In 2005, soldiers--as veterans, conscientious objectors, witnesses and resisters--came to report just how terrible the war really was and to make it impossible to marginalize the antiwar movement as unpatriotic or cowardly. A second chance because when Sheehan spoke up, it somehow became possible for many others to do so, and the time was right. The Bush Administration's prognostications for the war, having lost their sheen for many would-be believers, had begun to smell ever more like lies and delusions.

Cindy Sheehan was a surprise to the world, but Camp Casey was a surprise to her, one that seems to have allowed her to transmute her grief into political change and to find a public ready to meet her with love and shared outrage. I spent a day at the camp late in August--the day Hurricane Katrina struck the Southeast--and regretted I hadn't canceled everything, gone earlier and stayed longer. Ret. Col. Ann Wright, the US diplomat who resigned from the foreign service on March 19, 2003, in protest against the onrushing war, was running the camp with resoluteness and endless cheer. Like so many others I talked to during my day in Crawford, Wright seemed radiant with the joy of serving the deepest purposes and values of one's life. Everywhere people were having the public conversation about politics and values a lot of us dream about the rest of the time, average-looking people of all ages from all over the country.

Sheehan herself moved through the camp giving interviews, hugging veterans, receiving gifts, seemingly inexhaustible as though grief had left her nothing but a purity of purpose. She said at the end of her day and mine, as we headed back into Crawford in Code Pink co-founder Jodie Evans's car, "This is the most amazing thing that has ever happened to me and probably that ever will. I don't even think I would even want anything more amazing to happen to me." As she wrote more recently, "Camp Casey, with its wonderful feelings of love, acceptance, peace, community, joy, and yes, optimism for our future, gave me back my desire to live."

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