You have to see it to believe it.  This Christian Science Monitor article attacks the “frame”of the grieving mother by exploiting language to differentiate between grieving families opposed to the war and anti-war activists who oppose the war to serve their own political agendas.

EXCUSE ME?
The Iraq war and the politics of grief

By Brendan O’Neill

LONDON –  In America and Britain, the grief of parents who lost sons or daughters in Iraq has become a potent political weapon – much more so than in other recent wars.

What a scary thing, that grief can become a weapon, a potent political force.  (with a Jon Stewart accent) DAMN YOU FAMILIES, grieving for you loved ones in a senseless war based on greed!

How has the grief of families become, in the words of a Scottish newspaper columnist, a “significant political force on both sides of the Atlantic”? In wars gone by, the sorrow felt by parents was no less intense than that experienced over Iraq, yet it was rare for personal grief to go so public.

Personal grief goes public and resonates with my personal grief for the hijacking of my country by neocon war mongers.

Today, doubt and uncertainty – and even shame – about the Iraq war from the top of society down has turned families’ grief into bitterness, and even public rage. In the past, bereaved families took comfort in the belief that their son or daughter died for a greater cause; traditional notions of honor, patriotism, and duty would have given their loved one’s death on the battlefield some meaning.

Now, families have few ways to make sense of the deaths in Iraq. The casus belli that their sons and daughters gave their lives for – the need to get rid of Saddam Hussein’s deadly WMD – turned out to be false.

It’s all false!  And we knew it was false!  That’s why we were against the war in the first place.  I would like to tell you about another family, marching in the streets of Hollywood to voice our objections to this obscene war, but no one listened to us.  They were mesmerized by the neocon war mongers (who also happened to own the propaganda machines that were disseminating their message.)

And how could such deaths be seen as a source of pride, as they might have been in earlier periods, when even our leaders seem embarrassed by the Iraqi debacle? The Pentagon ban on releasing photographs of returning military coffins suggested it is ashamed of the war dead, seeking to sneak them through the back door and hurry them into the earth without anybody noticing. (That policy was changed last week – more than two years after the war began – in a settlement of a Freedom of Information suit.) President Bush has been criticized for failing to attend the funerals of slain servicemen and women.

Embarrassed by the Iraqi debacle?  Suppressing photos of the coffins of the honored dead?  Ashamed of the war that killed them?  Oh, excuse me, what was my suspect political agenda in being opposed to this war from Day One and now supporting Cindy Sheehan who SPEAKS FOR ME??? Did you think that I just came across an article about her one fine day and said OMG here is grief I can exploit to make my point that this war is an OBSCENITY?    

There’s another reason grief has become a “significant political force” – some in the antiwar movement are exploiting it. As the Los Angeles Times said of Sheehan’s camp-out in Crawford, “leading liberal and antiwar activists [are] parachuting in to try to make her their long-sought voice.” Michael Moore made Lila Lipscomb’s grief into an international issue. Antiwar author Naomi Klein has described the image of a grieving mom or dad as “the mother of all antiwar forces.”

HELLO!!!! Mothers are people.  Mothers have issues.  Come back from the other side of the looking glass.  These are HUMAN BEINGS who are outraged by the way that their children were murdered (oh, maybe I should have said exploited) in the cause of an unjust war, AND WE SUPPORT THEM.  They need our support, and we give it with love and generosity.

There is something deeply cynical and morbid – and I say this as one who was implacably opposed to the war – about these attempts to further publicize and politicize the families’ grief. It’s almost as if some in the antiwar lobby want the families of the dead to do their dirty work for them, as if it is enough to point to a weeping mom to make the case against war. They are relying on images of hardship and sorrow rather than making the hard political case against Western military intervention abroad.

Do their dirty work?  We want to end a war that should never have been waged, which it totally unjustified, based on lies, and should never have been waged in the first place.  How deeply cynical and morbid is that?

On one side, warmakers have left military families to work through their grief alone and confused, and on the other, antiwar forces push these families further into the spotlight. This is a sorry substitute for a serious political debate about Iraq – and it is likely only to exacerbate families’ grief.

Cindy, were you pushed into the spotlight by cynical and morbid forces, or did you just step in there because your son was murdered by an embarrassing, suspect war?  Are you a pawn in the cynical and morbid protest movement against an illegal, immoral, unjust, illegitimate, illegal, cynical, and morbid (as in death-producing) war that should never have happened in the first place?

 I can’t tell you how much grief I felt during the Bike Guy’s march to war.   I went to anti-war demonstrations, my whole family went to anti-war demonstrations, we marched on CNN in Hollywood in our thousands understanding the inner workings of the way the media was promoting this political obscenity.  CNN never covered it.

But now, suddenly, there is a distinction between anti-war activism and the legitimate grief of families who have suffered the loss of loved ones in a meaningless war and have become anti-war activists.  I would just like to know exactly what that distinction is.

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