Mother’s Day wasn’t meant to honor mothers, but to end war

The original intent of Mother’s Day wasn’t about brunch, flowers, or Kay’s Jewelers.

Note: I originally posted this in 2010. As our leaders rattle the sabers once more (Syria, North Korea), and the glorification of war appears to go on unabated, I think this bears repeating. 

Original post: 

As a mother, and a human being who is weary of war, how I wish that on Mother’s Day we would, for at least one day of the year, remember the ravages of war.

The original Mother’s Day was proclaimed by Julia Ward Howe in the aftermath of the American Civil War.

The horrors of the Civil War even changed those the conflict made famous. Speaking to a graduating class of military cadets years later, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman uttered his famous truth about the nature of warfare as part of a rebuke to the era’s “chicken-hawks,” people who call for war without having experienced it.

“I confess without shame that I am tired and sick of war,” Sherman said. “Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded, who cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is Hell.”

By 1870, Julia Ward Howe had been deeply affected both by the ongoing agonies of Civil War veterans and the carnage occurring overseas in the Franco-Prussian War. Though very short, that war resulted in almost 100,000 killed in action plus another 100,000 lethally wounded or sickened.

The First Mother’s Day

So, as a humanist who cared about suffering people – as well as a feminist and a suffragette who advocated social justice – Howe penned her “Mother’s Day Proclamation” in 1870 as an appeal to mothers to spare their sons and the sons of others from the depredations of war.

The Mother’s Day Proclamation was partly a lament for the useless deaths and partly a call to action to stop future wars. The call was directed, not to men, many of whom may have felt proud for their “service,” but to women, who often have proved more thoughtful and humane about issues of human suffering.

Then, on June 2, 1872, in New York City, Julia Ward Howe held the first “Mother’s Day” as an anti-war observance, a practice Howe continued in Boston for the next decade before it died out.

The modern Mother’s Day, with its apolitical message, emerged in the early Twentieth Century, with Howe’s original intent largely erased from the mainstream consciousness. Howe’s vision of an antiwar mother’s call to action was watered-down into an annual expression of sentimentality.

[ . . . ]

Julia Ward Howe’s Mother’s Day Proclamation of 1870:

Arise then, women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or tears!

Say firmly: ‘We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies.

Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.

Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have taught them of charity, mercy and patience.

We women of one country will be too tender of those of another to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.’

“From the bosom of the devastated earth, a voice goes up with our own. It says, ‘Disarm, disarm!’

The sword of murder is not the balance of justice. Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor does violence indicate possession.

As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar but of God.

In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality may be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.

Please read.

Making sense

I’m completely wrapped up in my photography right now.  It’s all I want to do.

It is my escape and my addiction.

Still the real world calls. Work. Family. Critters. House work.

Photography makes more sense to me than just about anything going on out there. The Republican primary? I can’t say anything that isn’t already being said by thousands of other voices.

I can’t make sense of the full-scale assault on women’s reproductive rights. Yes, it is a  war on women, one that Democrats/Progressives/Liberals have allowed to happen either by collaboration or apathy. While I agree with Gaius that women’s access to contraception should  be of vital importance to men, it does not appear to be. And contrary to what he says, what is happening right now is not a war on the sexual revolution as a whole as only half of the “revolutionaries” are being targeted. If it were not so, we’d see hundreds of anti-pornography bills being enacted in state houses all over the country. We aren’t. How about anti-divorce legislation? Nada. It’s all about the woman and her baby-making parts. It is all about patriarchy and putting women in their place.

And I can’t make any sense of it.

I can’t make sense of a soldier engaging in wholesale slaughter of innocents. I can’t make sense of the wars he’s been sent to that pushed him over the edge. I can’t make sense of the bloodshed that is sure to come in retaliation. Hearts and minds, indeed.

I can’t make sense of two children dying in a fire caused by their mother’s religious “blessing” and then seeing her front and center at her children’s memorial service as though she is the victim.  Does that sound harsh?  I’ve toned it down.

I can’t make sense of politicians who think government should be run like a business, especially in light of the ”blood out of a turnip” nonsense that has been going on at work for three years now.

I still can’t make sense of what happened with my mother, try as I might.

I can’t make sense of much of anything, so I make photographs.

I choose the subject. I control the exposure and the processing.  It is art and it is science, and right now, it is the glue holding me together.

The protector of our prosperity

Anyone surprised by this?

I saw this coming:

At the same lunch, which was sponsored by three conservative think tanks, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said he plans to seek a legislative way to waive the $600 billion in national security cuts that would be required if the superpanel fails.

And this too:

At the lunch event and during an earlier House Armed Services Committee hearing, it became apparent that pro-defense Republicans — who also staunchly oppose any tax hikes to swell federal coffers — want the entire $1.2 trillion amount to come from domestic entitlement programs.

During the GOP supercommittee members’ closed-door meetings, “there is a feeling that the discretionary side has already given its part” of needed federal cuts under the August debt deal, Kyl said.

The Republicans will press the 12-member bipartisan panel to focus solely on reforming politically volatile entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare.

“In a $3.5 trillion [entitlement] budget, there is enough slop in the system” to find $1.2 trillion in savings “without touching benefits or how those programs work,” Kyl said.

But I haven’t heard it put quite this way before. Jeebus on a triscuit:

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) also zeroed in on entitlement program cuts.

“It is time we focus our fiscal restraint on the driver of the debt, instead of the protector of our prosperity,” McKeon said.

Up is down and black is white in Buck’s world.  McKeon has it exactly backwards. It isn’t Social Security that is driving out debt, it is endless wars and a bloated defense budget.  The protector of our prosperity IS our social safety net.

Lovely.The Military-Entertainment Complex

No, you weren’t imagining it.

David Sirota:

As Mace Neufeld, the producer of the 1990 film “The Hunt for Red October,” later recounted to Variety, studios in the post-“Top Gun” era instituted an unstated rule telling screenwriters and directors to get military cooperation “or forget about making the picture.” Economics drives that directive, Time magazine reported in 1986. “Without such billion-dollar props, producers [have to] spend an inordinate amount of time and money searching for substitutes” and therefore might not be able to make the movie at all, the magazine noted.

Emboldened by Hollywood’s obsequiousness, military officials became increasingly blunt about how they deploy the carrot of subsidized hardware and the stick of denied access to get what they want. Strub described the approval process to Variety in 1994: “The main criteria we use is . . . how could the proposed production benefit the military . . . could it help in recruiting [and] is it in sync with present policy?”

 

How much are we spending on this “stalemate?”

What a cluster.

U.S. government experts believe the state of the opposition is so grave that it could take years to organize, arm and train them into a fighting force strong enough to drive Gaddafi from power and set up a working government.

The realistic outlook, U.S. and European officials said, is for an indefinite stalemate between the rebels — supported by NATO air power — and Gaddafi’s forces.

But NATO wants to double down.

Nato Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen has told a foreign ministers’ summit the alliance needs “a few more” aircraft for its mission in Libya.

Mr Rasmussen said he had received no offers from any ally at the meeting in Berlin to supply the extra warplanes, but he remained hopeful.

Nato would continue “day by day, strike by strike” to target Col Muammar Gaddafi’s forces, he told media.

Britain and France have been trying to persuade other Nato members to do more.

What if they gave a war and no one came?

I thought the U.S. was just providing “support.”

Washington withdrew its fighter jets as it scaled back its role in the mission, although US planes are still targeting Col Gaddafi’s air defences and it says it has still been flying a third of the missions.

Oh. I see. We’re still bombing them, just with different kinds of planes.

” …our fantasies about political rebellions…”

Susan Jacoby:

It is not that the status of women is the only issue but that the posture of radical Islam toward women is the miner’s canary regarding our fantasies about political rebellions being an inevitable precursor to a democracy that respects human rights. What we are talking about, in much of the Islamic world, is democracy for men (if indeed we are talking about democracy, as opposed to tribal and class-based battles, at all). A brand of Islam that represses women, coupled with ancient tribal customs inextricably bound to religion, is responsible for this reality.

If people don’t believe in individual freedom of conscience and human equality themselves, we shouldn’t be spending our blood and treasure on an American delusion, rooted in a multiculturalism that downplays anything bad about any faith and ignores the fatal role of repressive religion in attempts to build just modern societies.

Word.

Pretzel

On the way to work this morning I caught the last hour of The Stephanie Miller Show, and while she and the Mooks are on vacation, Hal Sparks, her “Obama-is-the-bestest-president-ever-and-we-must-never-ever-question-his-actions-even-when-his-actions-go-against-progressive/liberal-ideals-because-he-can’t-do-anything-else-because-of-those-eeevil-Republicans” soul mate, is hosting the show.  True to form, Libya is just a-okay with him, and any comparisons to Bush are completely out of line. Anyone trying to point out that the rationale used for Iraq is the same as that being used today for Libya was called a Bush-Lover and an Obama-Hater.

His logic was all over the map. First up:

“What would you expect the international community to do if the U.S. government starting lobbing bombs from the White House on peaceful (or rock throwing)  protestors? Would you expect them to sit  idly by?”

By that logic. we should be bombing the shit out of Israel, right? What about when Iran was attacking protestors? Oh, we couldn’t do that, according to Hal, because Iran really has a huge air force and we’d really be up against it then.

So . . . we only pick on countries we know we can trounce? Isn’t that what “our side” said about Bush and Iraq?

Then he started talking about oil. Of course we have to do this, he said,  because we are dependent on oil, and they’ve got some and we’ve got to keep the flow going. And until we wean ourselves from the teat of oil, well, then, let the bombs fly.

That’s why we didn’t go into Darfur, he noted. So, even though the casualty count was far higher and the conflict far longer than this one, it was okay for us to sit that one out, according to Sparks. Wowzer.

Honestly, I was having trouble keeping up with his rapidly changing rationales.

But in the end, there was no questioning of Dear Leader. Not one word.

Pathetic.

Monday Meanderings: Coulter Smackdown, Dr. Oz, Abortion Police, and more

We woke up to six inches of snow that had fallen overnight, so I’m delaying the drive into work until the sun comes up and raises the temperature a bit.

In the meantime, I’m clicking through my blogroll.

David Gorski over at Science-Based Medicine takes on Ann Coulter’s radiation “vaccine.” It is an excellent and informative post, and he links to a handy-dandy radiation chart at xkcd which should help put some minds at ease.

The reason for my sarcastic characterization of Coulter’s scientific nonsense is because her article uses many of the same tactics as any denialist. Chief among these is that Coulter takes the germ of a scientific controversy and then uses it to try to imply that the scientific consensus is fatally flawed. In this case, the scientific controversy is over how dangerous low level exposure to radiation is used to imply that the radiation from a nuclear disaster is not potentially harmful.

Every time someone mentions Dr. Oz to me, I cringe. This is why:

Or, one could say that there are times when Dr. Oz’s knowledge isn’t equal with that of skeptics who actually pay attention to these things. Otherwise he wouldn’t be so amazed by Edward’s transparent schtick. But he is, and once again he uses the argument from incredulity. Worse, he uses his position as a physician to create a false argument from authority. Just because he can’t imagine a scientific explanation for what John Edward does, Oz assumes that there isn’t one, and most of his audience accepts his authority as a surgeon as being reason enough to accept his assertion that science can’t explain Edward:

But I can’t make up an explanation for what John Edward does. And, again, what was most eerie was his level of detail, the concreteness of it all.

Which is, of course, what psychic mediums do. It’s what they do and have done for hundreds of years, if not longer. It’s not for nothing that John Rennie characterized Oz as the “great and gullible.” Dr. Oz was gullible when it came to faith healing and quackery, and he surpasses himself in gullibility in his treatment of John Edward and psychic mediums. What they do and how they do it are not mysteries to, for example, James Randi or Joe Nickell, who quite properly described Edward as “hustling the bereaved.”

For more on cold reading, see my recent post, Sunday Morning Video: “But, the psychic knew things no one else could know!”

PZ Myers on the Republican abortion police:

Why are they doing this? Because they are spoiled children who refuse to think that a few pennies from their pocket might end up helping some horrible woman who got pregnant.

Desert Beacon explains: H.R. 3: The More You Look The Worse It Gets

The more things change, the more they stay the same. I posted this on my FB wall when Greenwald first posted it: Libya and the familiar patterns of war

All that said, it is striking how wars — no matter how they’re packaged — ultimately breed the same patterns.  With public opinion split or even against the war in Libya (at least for now) — and with questions naturally arising about why we’re intervening here to stop the violence but ignoring the growing violence from our good friends in Yemen, Bahrain and elsewhere — the administration obviously knows that some good, old-fashioned fear-mongering and unique demonization (Gadaffi is a Terrorist with ”deadly mustard gas”who might attack us!!) can only help.  Then there’s the fact that the same faction of war-loving-from-a-safe-distance “hawks” that took the lead in cheering for the attack on Iraq — neoconson the Right and their “liberal interventionist” counterparts in The New Republic/Brookings/Democratic Party officialdom world — are playing the same role here.  And many of the same manipulative rhetorical tactics are now wielded against war opponents:  the Libyan rebels are the new Kurds (they want us to act to protect them!), and just as those who opposed the attack on Iraq were routinely accused of indifference toward if not support for Saddam’s tyranny, those who oppose this intervention are now accused of indifference to Gadaffi’s butchery (as always:  are those refraining from advocating for military intervention in Yemen or Saudi Arabia or Bahrain or the Sudan or dozens of other places indifferent to the violence and other forms of suffering there?).

Finally, Gaius on our warrior culture.

The prestige of soldiers goes hand in hand, as the propagandists of NRO well know, with the prestige of war.

Together, these have led us in a little over 200 years from a struggling birth to being the world’s unique hyper-puissance, spending all on our own almost as much on military power as the whole rest of humanity, combined, in support of a global military presence and of wars fought in regular sequence as far as half a world away.

Is that what we want?

If not, then with all due respect for the remarkable Senator Webb, I must say we can no longer afford the customary American admiration for martial virtue.

[ . . .]

The American love of war, victory, and soldierly virtue has made us what we are, today.

Like it or not.