Sunday, May 13, 2012

Mother's Day:Celebrating those that birth us

Their precious market makes a commodity out of everything, everything must be able to be bought and sold.  To facilitate this, they make cultural holidays and celebrations that have their origin in antiquity and beyond special days where buying and selling can reach a frenzy and surplus value freed from its commodity form. 

This is why Christmas, Valentines day and all these sales day's are so horrible and depressing as the emptiness of them fades and real life returns.  I had little, if any knowledge of Mother's Day, we become so cynical about these things, numbed by the hype and artificiality of it.  But Mother's day didn't originate in an office on Madison Avenue.  Mother's Day has its origins in much more fertile soil----the head of Julia Ward Howe.  Howe wrote The Battle Hymn of the Republic the Mother's Day Proclamation.  She was born in to a wealthy bourgeois family and like others from that background and her time, was a social activist, abolitionist and feminist.  She was not to my knowledge a socialist but the words below are inspiring, against war and worthy of Mother's Day.  They are words that the class from which she came hate.

Arise then...women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
"We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will 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 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."
From the bosom of a devastated Earth a voice goes up withOur own. It says: "Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."
Blood does not wipe out dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough 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 humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And 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.

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