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Have we lost touch with what grief means? Grieving mothers become political tools for passing a law to stop future deaths. Cindy Sheehan mourns her son and tries to change the world so that we don't send our sons and daughters to die in a pointless, suicidal war. After a couple of months, we wonder at her sustained grief. "Why can't she get over it?" Has there ever been in human history a race of people so callous as we are today? You can't even say "I feel your pain" anymore without sounding utterly sarcastic. Try it.
I'll tell you who Cindy Sheehan would be in ancient Greece. She would be an epic hero out of Homer, the changing force of grief. She would step in between the Greeks and the Trojans on the battlefield, weeping for her son and telling them to stop. She would be slain while trying to hold back their weapons, and the noble parties to that war would feel so much guilt that their rage would be extinguished, and the war would end.
That's the way it worked back in ancient Greece. Those guys weren't all bad. All that's changed between then and now is how good we've gotten at getting callous. We brainwash ourselves so we don't think about how we are killing fathers, mothers, guys who are good at math, women who flirted once in a Baghdad mall. The insurgents don't think about us either. No grief, no despair. Just a dull throbbing.