SALUTING CINDY SHEEHAN. Blog About Town ends its extensive Peace Day coverage with a salute to Cindy Sheehan, the most prominent peace activist in the United States today.

Sheehan and the Bring Them Home Now tour came to the Johns Hopkins campus yesterday on the way to demonstrations in Washington, DC. "It was inspiring, very grassroots, the antithesis of slick," reports a friend who was on the scene. "Lots of pain, anger and some hope. Lots of family members of soldiers, alive and dead, and some veterans — some eloquent, some inchoate."

Sounds good — unlike Sheehan & Company's visit to Union Square on Monday. Sarah Ferguson of the Village Voice reports that Mayor Bloomberg's police arrested an organizer and confiscated the microphone as soon as Sheehan finished speaking, citing a (gasp) sound permit charge! (I imagine that New York's Fussiest then returned to harassing bicyclists.)

Having spent many years contemplating war and peace, Blog About Town is firmly convinced that the best time to work for peace is before war breaks out. After war starts, the situation tends to become appallingly complex, as can be seen in Iraq. Confronting the complexity, peace activists such as Sheehan are in a tough situation — their messages can become "inchoate" at times and some fellow travelers may, regrettably, actually advocate some forms of hate and violence themselves. Yet much of Sheehan's message deserves attention and support. It is simply outrageous that the Bush administration has led thousands and thousands of soldiers to wage war in Iraq without providing a credible rationale and without building substantial international support. It is imperative that American citizens hold Bush and his cronies accountable for their recklessness.