It is tempting to blame Sheehan's therapy group for joining her on her emotional journey, but in actual fact, Sheehan herself strongly encouraged the reinforcements.
On Saturday, (and Friday) the whole event suddenly swelled to bursting when supporters of President Bush, the Armed Services and the effort in Iraq, put down their collective foot and declared, "Enough!"
Pro-American rallies sprang up all over town, encircling these hippies of yesteryear with a variety of themes. There were clusters of Bush supporters; Rolling Thunder staked out the town center with "Support the Troops" signs; a prayer vigil for the troops commenced across from the ranch at high noon; Support the troops rallies came to life spontaneously throughout the "war zone";
And a lone shopkeeper stood outside with his microphone, attracting a steady audience to his display of the ten commandments and Liberty Bell.
As the crowds increased and the volume of traffic on the roads neared peak capacity, the hippies decided to launch a caravan of gas-guzzling cars from the Crawford Peace House on a five mile journey to the bottom of the road that leads to the Bush Ranch. They held their aging, gnarly, two-fingered peace signs pompously up to mostly closed car windows, refusing eye-contact. A few of the younger, less-embittered ones sarcastically mouthed "I love you" at the Americans waving flags on the roadside.
Unfortunately, this convoy of gas-wasting, anti-American activists brought the roads in Crawford to a grinding halt. They further exacerbated the problem by parking their environmentally-unfriendly pickup trucks on both sides of this already narrow, rural highway, reducing the width of the passage available for through traffic.
A simple trip to the grocery store for a local resident now had become a two hour ordeal.
The hippies who made the trip from the Crawford "Peace" House to the Sheehan Camp at the ranch were in for a boring surprise. After being bombarded with roadside "Support the Troops" displays, they had arrived at their final destination expecting to now have the opportunity to do "something" that would "make a difference." Instead they discovered there was nothing at the base of the ranch but people trying to figure out where they were supposed to be. "Which rally is this?" was probably the most frequent topic of conversation for the entire event.
Many in the crowds did eventually determine in which camp they belonged and late in the afternoon the traffic eased. For the sake of the Town of Crawford, though, we can only hope that President Bush cuts his holiday short or heads over to Camp David where they're used to dealing with these kinds of situations.
Copyright 2005
