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In the Name of Mothers Around the World
Women know that war is SO over. We know it in our hearts, in our guts, in our wombs. We know that the madness in Iraq and Afghanistan has to end, that we cannot keep sending our children to kill the children of mothers across the globe. Last month at an appearance in Turkey, President Obama himself said “…sometimes I think that if you just put the mothers in charge for a while, that things would get resolved.”
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| Mother's Day pledge by Noo Dal Molin |
It is nearly 140 years since Julia Ward Howe wrote her Mother’s Day Proclamation, a pacifist reaction to the carnage of the American Civil War and the Franco–Prussian War. It flowed from her feminist belief that women had a responsibility to shape their societies at the political level. Every year since CODEPINK began in 2002, we have worked to remind the public and media that Mother’s Day isn’t really about Hallmark and Teleflora, but was a call for women to gather in “the great and general interests of peace.” Howe knew then what we know now. It will take women’s leadership to undermine what have become the USA’s greatest exports: Violence, Weapons and War.
This year we knew those who could attend our 24-hour weekend vigil outside the White House would be smaller than before, given the fiscal crunch we are all feeling. We created a project so those who wanted could add to the activities. In the past we have done an aerial image of thousands of bodies spelling Mother’s Say No To War photographed from the Washington Monument with the White House in the background. But this year we put out a call for people to knit pink and green squares that we would sew together to read “We will not raise our children to kill another mother’s child” and place across the White House fence. Thousands of pink and green knitted squares have been filling the basement of the CODEPINK house in D.C. They arrive with stories of how they were knitted with love, passion and conviction, with photos of the joys shared in knitting circles around the world. The surprise has been that more women than ever want to participate, more women want to join together in community and engage in conversation.
They want answers. What they hear in the media makes no sense. Why are we leaving more soldiers and private mercenaries in Iraq and not getting out on the date promised? Why are we moving soldiers to Afghanistan when our military has told us there is no military solution? How can we end the violence and protect the women? How can we turn our back on the women and children in Gaza? Why is the military budget larger than under Bush (and that’s not counting another supplemental on Iraq and Afghanistan tacked on)? Why are we spending so much money on destruction, when Obama himself said in his inaugural address, “people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy”?
Women are fired up to gather together and expose the emptiness of the continued push for more weapons and more money for war.
We hope that our gathering on Mother’s Day will plant the seeds of new energy and new coalitions we will need to affect a world drunk on war. It falls on us to bring peace to the table, to push our way to the table and not let up. Women know that instead of sending our young people overseas as soldiers, we need to send troops of doctors, teachers, business leaders, economists, farmers and peacekeepers who can build the economic structures for security to take root.
During our Mother’s Day weekend in DC, we will celebrate our sisterhood with song and poetry and fun, peace-building children’s activities, but we will also share our pain and grief by hearing the stories of women whose lives have been shattered by war—both women from war zones and mothers of American soldiers. When we bear witness to one another’s stories, we create a deeper, more compassionate foundation from which we can work together for peace.
Even if you can’t join us in D.C., you can send a rose to honor a mother whose life has been profoundly affected by war. On Mother’s Day we will deliver the roses to the mothers and tie others to the fence outside the White House as a memorial to the dead and a moving call for peace.
However you spend your Mother’s Day, remember those women who have relentlessly stood for our rights in the past and know that we can bring peace. But first we MUST see it as possible and put our hoe in the ground.
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24 Comments so far
Show AllBravo.
i'm a pretty lame knitter but sent in a dozen or so squares for the codepink 'white house cozy' since flying out to d.c. seems so nuts with all the jet fuel it would require.... i'm not a mother and never wanted to be actually, knowing what a violent world we live in.... just never felt like a great idea to reproduce to me, tho i do love life and the GREAT MOTHER, EARTH. the power dynamics on this planet aren't necessarily a gender issue so much as a take-on-reality issue, meaning that there's a crying need for us to really get past this crazy hyperindividualism mindset that hypnotizes us into thinking we are separate and thereby entitled to 'otherize' others, which, on the more reptilian end of the scale 'justifies' the insanity of killing. killing en masse is murder on steroids and not to be cheered or turned into an honorable enterprise via the clever word-twisting of orwellian pr militarists. as human beings we possess (as much as we 'possess' ANYthing, possessive/possessed 'consumers' as we are) SOOOOOOOOO much more potential for good than we are exercising... this crumbling of the empire's myths before our eyes can be a profound teaching if we let it.... mothers and all. we must not allow for the institutionalization of power-over: the commodification of every nook and cranny of our planet. there is way more creativity ready to burst forth from humanity than we've seen in the impressive, but certainly fraught with problems, industrial age. it's time for a paradigm shift for sure. simplifying and opting out of the allure of materialist hoarding and owning and dominating is and always has been the way of the peaceful who walk their talk. at the risk of drawing a bunch of obama-bashing responses, i just have to quote him since he did say we have to 'make him do it'..... no instruction came as to HOW to make him do it, but maybe incrementally our collective words, intentions, everyday actions accumulate and our voices eventually do get heard, NO thanks to the purveyors of violence on whatever 'side':
TO THOSE NATIONS LIKE OURS THAT ENJOY RELATIVE PLENTY, WE SAY WE CAN NO LONGER AFFORD INDIFFERENCE TO SUFFERING OUTSIDE OUR BORDERS, NOR CAN WE CONSUME THE WORLD'S RESOURCES WITHOUT REGARD TO EFFECT. FOR THE WORLD HAS CHANGED, AND WE MUST CHANGE WITH IT. -BHO, 1/20/09
i would only add that nations like ours not only enjoy relative plenty, but are struggling with the disparities of excess and poverty.... that we need to be on guard against the criminalization of the latter and the institutionalization of the former.
If the gun toting robokillers want to see courage look to the women who have opposed the greedy,violent male plutocracy throughout USA history, including Code Pink.
Agreed!!!
Thank you ladies for all that you do everyday! :-)
I give these women a standing ovation. True heroes.
Well, Obama's lead support came from financial interests, including Goldman Sachs and General Electric, and from defense contractors, including Generals Dynamic and Electric. So far we've gotten the bailout the banksters wanted and the warthe Generals wanted. Mothers - zip. Just flattery in a speech. By their acts and the fruits of their labor you shall know them.
I have been so proud of so many women who have opposed war and corruption on so many fronts. But for every one of them there has been a Pelosi and a Harmon and a Feinstein. The call to awaken to a new way of thinking has a way to go. And I think the fact that women and mothers have been such activists in the cause is actually used as a way to discredit its value, the whole women are hysterical, soft and don't think clearly like the generals who have, clearly, been doing a bang-up job.
My heart broke this morning when I read about the US massacre in Afghanistan on this website. Yes, I am a mother and I'd like to send in a rose to support the Code Pink people, but that approach seems so soft and unchallenging to the status quo. In the mean time Obama sends MORE troops to Afghanistan. He doesn't seem much deterred by the roses and knitting circles. I know that peaceful nonviolent resistance is supposed to be powerful, but I'm not sure that that translates into buying flowers and knitting and then saying we've done our part. This sounds very judgmental about the Code Pink people and I don't mean it to be. But I am struggling with the concept of what nonviolent resistance needs to be in the face of the horrors of US massacres of civilians.
Non violent resistance needs to be everything and anything. Ghandi was prepared to die from non violent resistance to prove his point. He took beatings and starved himself, as did others in their non violent struggle to free India. People chose to die in their non violent struggle rather than kill. In the end, it worked. Are you prepared to die in a non violent struggle to change the face of America? I'm not saying that you must die or that it will take your death, I sincerely hope not, enough have died already. But, the question remains, are you prepared to should it come to that? Personally, I don't know if I can answer yes to my own question but the lesson from Ghandi would indicate that's the question we all need to answer.
'Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.' - Pete Townsend
I hear you. The news on the banner this morning... I hardly know what to say anymore. It's been a long slog of uninterrupted defeats here on the left. Like you, I struggle with what resistance means. Even the Dalai Lama said on the 50th anniversary of the Chinese invasion of Tibet that he had failed. I was shocked to hear him say it, but it's true. His nonviolent resistance had in no way changed China's exploitation of Tibet.
On the other extreme there are always streakers through here, as down-thread, that claim that if we are still alive and not in jail then we are the problem. Supposedly, they are either in jail, posting from Hades, or exempt for being non-American. That seems to be the only test for complicity in evil these days: are you an American? You are the problem. Not the military, the governments, the financiers, the New World Order or the media. No, it's the knitters. Damn you. Damn me. We did it. Sigh.
Love the banner! Time to say "no" more often.
However, it's a sad thing when the taliban in the world have no more respect for a female, mother or not, than if she were a rock, perhaps less. They will treat her violently and severely. Shall we fight for these women and girls or pretend it's not happening? What could we do non-violently that would have any impact on these abusers and murderers?
The genesis of Mother's Day in the U.S.A. began when Anna Jarvis, an Appalachian homemaker, organized a day to raise awareness of poor health conditions in her community, 150 years ago.
Fifteen years later, Julia Ward Howe, a Boston poet, pacifist, suffragist, and author of the lyrics to the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," organized a day encouraging mothers to rally for peace, since she believed they bore the loss of human life more harshly than anyone else.
In 1870, she wrote the first Mother's Day Proclamation, from which I excerpt:
Arise then...women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
…From the voice of a 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 our 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 21st century, patriarchal testosterone driven 'civilization' persists in the manufacturing, use of, and exporting of weapons of destruction which terrorize innocent children just because they happen to have the misfortune to be born in any country that defies the empire builders of American hegemony.
In 1999, the UN dedicated the first decade of the 21st century to Create a Culture of Nonviolence for All Children of The World.
On December 29, 2005, while I was in the Little Town of Bethlehem: Occupied Territory, attending a workshop sponsored by the United Network of Young Peace Builders [UNOY] the Netherlands Expertise Center Alternatives to Violence and learned that America abstained from voting to Create a Culture of Nonviolence for All Children of The World and is on the record in the UN as stating:
"We cannot support this initiative as it will make it harder for us to wage war."
Eileen Fleming, Author, Founder WAWA:
http://www.wearewideawake.org/
Producer "30 Minutes With Vanunu" and "13 Minutes with Vanunu"
Thank you for posting that.
You'll obey boss class orders, as you have done all your lives.
The world is sick of your sanctimonious hypocrisy.
If you're not in prison, on the run, or dead because you resisted, then you're part of the problem.
Time for women to refuse to lend their bodies to the manufacture of cannon fodder.
redruby - send funds to the women's groups RAWA, eg. We should stop feeding the warmongers and abusers.
I'd rather have a gun under my burqua than a few bucks in a woman's group or roses in our safe U.S. of A haven. At least I could go down fighting.
Excellent idea!
Forward this article to all your women friends, mothers or not, and attach the "Mother's Day Proclamation". It's one way of keeping solidarity with the CodePink group sponsoring the vigil.
"Women know that war is SO over. We know it in our hearts, in our guts, in our wombs. We know that the madness in Iraq and Afghanistan has to end, that we cannot keep sending our children to kill the children of mothers across the globe. Last month at an appearance in Turkey, President Obama himself said “…sometimes I think that if you just put the mothers in charge for a while, that things would get resolved.”
Yes... Golda Meir and Margret Thatcher proved that.
God bless Barbara Bush, Nancy Pelosi, Diane Feinstein, and Jane Harman.
A good piece by the author.
Who can disagree with the natural law of elemental Motherly Instinct?
It also shows how increasingly wrong modernity's gross materialist allure has become in the knowings of our specie's gestators and initial care-givers.
Distilled further, it also says that the greed-based, violently predatory political and economic meta-system that the west's psychopathic moneyed elite have now addicted most of Humanity to, is inimical to the survival of human life, to say of sustainable human happiness, on planet Earth.
Of course, far too many American mom's still wouldn't want to hear any such thing...
"Who can disagree with the natural law of elemental Motherly Instinct?"
If only Cheney and Bush had mothers when they were young!
Did Hitler have a mother? I doubt it.
Come on all mothers are now pacifists, I have heard it all before. I remember turning 18 during the Vietnam days in a conservation corp camp, my mother told the people in charge to make sure I was taken to the courthouse to be registered for the draft within 10 days. Would that qualify her as a bad mother today? There were posters made during WWI Uncle Sam here is my boy printed on them. Wilson made a deal with the sufferages you back my war and I will help you get the vote. Did you ever wonder how women were marching for 50 or more years and magically got the vote two years after the war ended? Where were all the pacifists on 9 12 01 when the entire country wanted blood and Bush's popularity was in the 90's? I wonder how many pictures there are of Cindy Sheehan wearing Army sweatshirts?
Good Message code pink.
America is the meanest country in the world. Their fake Christian Republican fear/war mongers are constantly playing games with the people to push an imperial agenda.Control and fear, lead to war.
It starts in our schools at an early age. Machiavellian mentality's are taught to young boys early in life. If they are not tough than they are losers.
I am a victim of gang stalking torture conducted at a community level. 2.5 years.
The leaders of these torture groups are the same macho bully's you grew up with in school.
They are taught to be the next generation of stalkers.Why is that so hard to believe.
Its all very sick, and a good number claim they are Christians.
My 15 year old son is being bullied and picked on by the children of my stalkers. My son is a very gifted student, and a talented musician.He is a quiet calm mature young man for his age. Their is no reason for the harassment.
If you don't go to a Christian church and these animals set there sights on you and your family, you will be tortured for the rest of your life.
Welcome to a country that is afraid of gay marriage, womens right of choice,spends 900 billion a year on the military industrial complex, brain wash people with fear, lie about 9/11, wont pay for a mom to have a baby and stay home with it till kindergarten.
I could go on for hours, but the kicker is this, we torture our own people all the time, its in our culture of indifference and hate.
We are never wrong, the rest of the world wrong.
Born Free Men
Peace takes courage, WWJD , is my questions to Christians,
Nanoo
I like the way Code Pink has demonstrated endurance over the long haul of the current insanity.
Here's an idea. How about sending 21,000 mothers to Afganistan, match the troop levels. Have the mothers congregate with the mothers there. In reality, these mothers could very well change things.