Mother’s Day for Peace
Posted on | May 13, 2007 | 4 Comments
Growing up, my mom forbade any gun-like objects in the house. She loathed guns with an unabiding passion, so I didn’t have what many boys had — water pistols, cap guns, and the like.
I grew up loathing guns myself, perhaps to an irrational degree. I don’t know.
Anyway, it’s come to my recent attention that Mother’s Day (which the United States is celebrating today) began not as a “Hallmark Holiday” as I originally assumed, but as a proto-feminist holiday, to gather for the cause of peace following the Civil War.
There’s a sad irony today, what with the Powers That Be, those who most readily hide behind concepts of Family Values and middle-American notions of Mom and Apple Pie, jeopardizing the lives of those mothers’ sons and daughters in a needless and pointless war.
I know my mom’s gun-free world was one of fantasy, but damn if it wasn’t a fantasy worth aspiring to.
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May 14th, 2007 @ 7:31 am
The interesting thing about your post is in its revelation of the unreliability of conventional wisdom and the typically erroneous and cliche mindsets it leads to.
May 17th, 2007 @ 9:17 pm
I’m not for the war; in fact I think it was and is a colossal failure.
However, nobody forced any of the soldiers to join the Marines or the Army. They knew quite well that by signing up for the armed services, they could very well end up in a war zone. There’s no draft. They’re volunteers.
With that in mind, I simply don’t see your line of thinking that mommies’ kids are jeopardized. Of course they are jeopardized; they joined the military.
I do think it is time to bring them home though.
If our armies weren’t fighting with guns, you can rest assured that other armies would be.
Peter, while your thoughts are quite often soaked with fact and logic, I think you’re floating in left field on this one.
Peace (heh),
Gino
P.S. Stop by Flickr sometime. You can play with all our guns.
May 18th, 2007 @ 5:34 pm
There are, in fact, several origins of Mother’s Day. In the U.S. it dates to both Julia Ward Howe’s 1870 call for a day of peace (to be celebrated on June 2), and Anna Jarvis’s call for a day to celebrate motherhood. Ironically, Jarvis founds Mother’s Day in Grafton, West Virginia, while in 1908, Father’s Day was founded nearby in Fairmont, WV.
see http://www.mothersdaycelebration.com/mothers-day-history.html and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father's_day
May 27th, 2007 @ 8:11 pm
And here’s the birthplace of Anna Jarvis:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mojohand/517197464/in/photostream/