In 1955, Rosa Parks sat down in a bus and refused to move. She sparked a civil rights movement by that action. In 2005, I sat down in Crawford, Texas in front of George Bush’s ranch and energized the anti-war movement.

Do I see myself as a Rosa Parks? I see myself as Cindy Sheehan. I’ve never called myself the Rosa Parks of the anti-war movement, but it doesn’t upset me that other people have.

In the life I lived before my son Casey was killed in Iraq in 2004, I was a mother with four children. I sometimes worked two or three jobs to help our family makes ends meet so we could have health insurance and a roof over our heads. Everything I did was for my children – I was a Catholic youth minister and president of the Band Booster club where I worked on a weekly basis so my two younger kids could have band. Even though I was a democrat and I voted all the time and made sure I was up to speed on the issues we were voting on, politics and activism certainly were not major concerns in my life.

The reasons for going to war in Iraq were lies and deceptions. We never should have gone there in the first place. Things have just getting so much worse in Iraq and my heart is breaking for those people who have to live under this terror – and for our country; for my family, and the families of the tens of thousands of people who have been killed, wounded, or mentally, emotionally or psychologically damaged by this war. Before it gets too far, we really have to stop.

When I became involved in the anti-war movement years ago, I was very popular – because I only questioned the Iraq War or questioned the Republicans. But when I started holding the Democrats accountable for it, I became a pariah in many anti-war movements. We don’t have a true peace movement; it’s all just political movements that aim to embarrass the Republicans or not embarrass the Democrats.

What we need is a peace movement that truly holds everybody accountable and works for peace by calling an end to militarism in our country. We need to start challenging the system, not just a certain political party, or we’re never going to have an effective movement. We may end the Iraq War, but in another 15 years, we’ll be mired in another mess.

Abandoning The Lesser Of Two Evils

We chose the lesser of two evils in November of ‘06 and nothing has happened. We’ve had lesser-of-two-evils-voting in our country for decades and we’re crumbling from the inside.

We have hit bottom during the Bush regime. And we’ve seen in the last 16 months that the Democrats are not part of the solution either. We have to challenge the two-party system because the two parties are basically the same – as Ralph Nader says, there’s not a dime’s worth of difference.

We’re like a house of cards that’s just getting ready to topple because of corrupt politics and corporate interests. We need to challenge it from the outside, not the inside.

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Visit Cindy's website: Cindy for Congress [1]