Cindy Sheehan Vigil

I'd like to thank the 80+ folks who showed up last night for the vigil that Angry Black Bitch and I hosted at AMP in honor of Cindy Sheehan and her son Casey.

I'd like to thank ABB for scoring some candles, telling my ass to calm down when I got all squirrelly and taking my ass out later for a sandwich. I'd also like to thank my pal Brian for some inspiration and his encouraging words before we started the vigil at 7:30-ish.

I'm not sure if we hosted the kind of vigil that MoveOn.org wanted us to host -- we got an e-mail yesterday instructing us to observe 45 minutes of silence in honor of Cindy.

Well, that seemed a bit...um...unrealistic, considering we were hosting our event in a bar. As a side note, some folks asked us why we chose a bar to host our vigil.

This is why:
The fellas who own the bar play kick-ass music, they're supporters of the labor strike against Anheuser Busch and they're a locally-owned gay business that gives a shit about our community and our country. I, for one, would have not attended a vigil at a Catholic Church – where another local vigil was hosted last night. I said it earlier about Baptists, and I sure as shit will say it about Pope Benedict. His Christ is not my Jesus.

Anyway...I haggled with ABB over the amount of time we could realistically expect folks to be quiet and we agreed that we'd have 5 minutes of silence and then light candles in the window that face Manchester (a pretty busy street here in St. Louis). Those candles burned until 10 PM or so.

MoveOn.org sent us a questionnaire today asking what we'll remember most about the event.

Two things come to mind.

The first is that one of my art history teachers from college and her two children were at AMP last night. When Dubya's father took us to war in Iraq in 1991, I was 20 years old - and in her class when news broke about the war.* I remember her eloquence. I remember how pissed and terrified I was. I remember feeling powerless. I felt a different pang of piss-offedness and terror last night meeting her kids.

Fortunately, I don't feel so powerless anymore.

I was also struck by a very lovely couple that were there with three boys. I assumed the boys were their children. They showed up, lit candles, mingled and talked with folks.

I caught sight of them again as they were leaving. Before walking out of earshot, the mom turned to the boys and asked them if they wanted to go get some ice cream.

I was, at first, a little surprised hearing the question.

I got a little riled up and thought, “Is that what you’re teaching your kids? If you guys behave at the vigil -- you’ll get an ice cream cone?”

And then it occurred to me that Cindy Sheehan would much rather be taking her son out to ice cream than standing in a field in Crawford, Texas.

It also occurred to me that most mothers would rather be treating their sons to a banana split than taking them to a smoky gay bar to observe a moment of silence for a grieving mother and her dead son.

And as I was thinking about this last night before I went to bed, crying and smiling at the same time.

I awoke this morning to this quote in my in-box -- it's one of those daily inspiration messages that usually some hokey-smoke love is a dolphin new-agey crap. But not so much today:

The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave. -- Patrick Henry

I'm going to keep doing my part to be all of the above. And maybe buy a new hat every now and then. Even Patrick Henry had a fancy wig, kids....

* NOTE: In my first posting of this entry, I made in error concerning Casey Sheehan's age -- and removed the inaccurate sentence.