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Happy Mother’s Day! Have you visited your mother yet? Maybe taken her out to eat? Or sent her flowers? Chocolates? A card? Or even bought her jewelry? Your wife too, if she’s a mother or mother to be. On Mother’s Day we honor our mothers, and this is how we do it. You have no excuse for having forgotten. Television commercials have been reminding you since Easter!
Unfortunately the economy sucks right now and a lot of in this country are out of work, underemployed, struggling with tuition increases at our colleges, paying off student loan or credit card debt, stretched thin because we are trying to help family and friends get by, trying to get by on insufficient retirement assets, or whatever. If that’s the case, just go see or call your mother. Mothers are always happy to hear from their children.
But if you want to be creative and distinct, tell your Mom you are going to take her to celebrate Mother’s Day in the way it was historically conceived, and take her to a peace rally!
Julia Ward Howe
Yes, that’s right. Mother’s Day began in 1870 as an anti-war movement. Here’s a segment of the declaration calling for mothers to unite by Julia Ward Howe.
“We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
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For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”
That poem is by Julia Maria Howe, the abolitionists, suffragette, social activist and writer who had penned “The Battle Him of the Republic.” She had witnessed the ravages of the Civil War in the United States, and was aware of the tensions fermenting in Europe that would soon break out into the Franco-Prussian War. She called for a Mother’s Day for Peace, an international solidarity movement in which mothers would lead the peace movement, not wanting to see their children die or be responsible for the death of another mother’s child.
Of course a call to war is invariably accompanied by propaganda that seeks to dehumanize the enemy, and if this is successful, then this impulse that she saw as so fundamentally maternal is negated. One might think that in an age in which media gives us immediate and direct access to events all over the world, this demonization would be more challenging than it was when in 1870. But it doesn’t seem to be.
In any case, on this Mother’s Day and on all those to come, perhaps we can take a few minutes to honor all mothers by doing one thing to promote cultural understanding, peace and justice, so that a mother somewhere doesn’t have to bury her child because of a war.