and the True Intent of Mother’s Day
by Valerie Elverton-Dixon on May 7, 2010 (Tikkun)
When Celeste Zappala’s son, Sherwood Baker, decided to join the Pennsylvania National Guard, he assured her that the most violent duty he would have to perform would probably be to confront his parents at a peace rally that got too rowdy. Zappala has always opposed violence and war. She taught these values to her son.
He was a social worker. However, after Sherwood started to have some financial trouble, the National Guard seemed to be an opportunity to earn extra money. He could pay off his college loans and make a down payment on a house. He and his wife were starting a family. They had a young son. It was also an opportunity to serve in a branch of the nation’s armed forces whose primary mission was to help people in times of trouble. “The National Guard never goes to foreign war,” Zappala thought. “9/11 changed everything.”
Members of the Pennsylvania National Guard were deployed to Iraq, and on April 26, 2004, Sherwood was killed by an explosion in Baghdad. His mission was to search for weapons of mass destruction. He was the first Pennsylvania guardsman killed in combat in a foreign war since World War II.
Celeste Zappala was a witness this past March at a Truth Commission on Conscience in War held at the Riverside Church in New York City. Her testimony about her son told of a man who was serious about his obligations to his family, his country and to his own word. He told her he would go to Iraq because “I made an oath before God to do my duty.”
However, his country did not do its duty to him, and it does not do its duty to members of the National Guard and to their families. Members of the Guard tend to be older than recruits into other branches of the military. They have jobs and families. Their families tend to live far from military bases, thus they get “precious little support,” according to Zappala. When members of the Guard are deployed to foreign wars they can lose their families, jobs, health and even their lives.
For Zappala, this is a betrayal. Guard members want to do their duty, but when they are asked to kill and to die on foreign battlefields when they signed to perform very different duties, they are left with no viable choices. Nothing can bring Celeste Zappala’s son back to her or bring back the thousands of other sons and daughters who have died in Afghanistan and in Iraq, but she spends much time and effort working for peace.
According to the Truth Commission web site. “Since losing Sherwood, she and her family have worked relentlessly to promote a peaceful end to the occupation of Iraq. She has spoken out in many U.S. cities, was a featured speaker at a 2007 International Peace Conference in Istanbul and at the 2008 Japan Mother’s Conference.” (www.conscienceinwar.org/who_bios.php)
Mother’s working for peace is the true intent of Mother’s Day in the United States. In 1870, Julia Ward Howe, the woman who wrote the words to the Battle Hymn of the Republic, appalled by the carnage of both the U.S. Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War, wrote a Mother’s Day Proclamation. The proclamation called on women to refuse husbands coming to them smelling of death and expecting approbation. It urges women to refuse to allow their sons to be taken away to unlearn the morality mothers have taught them and injure the sons of other women. It asks women to raise their voices for disarmament and to organize international peace congresses: “To promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.”
Howe originally wanted her vision of Mother’s Day to occur on July 4. However, June 2, 1873, Mother’s Day was observed in 18 North American cities. Most of these observances ended when Howe stopped funding them. The Mother’s Day that we celebrate now started in West Virginia as a day of reconciliation after the Civil War. Anna Reeves Jarvis wanted a day that would bring together families and neighbors who had fought on different sides during the war. It was considered a “Mother’s Day Friendship Day.”
When Anna Reeves Jarvis died, her daughter Anna M. Jarvis worked for an official Mother’s Day to honor mothers and to honor peace. May 10, 1908, she handed out carnations, her mother’s favorite flower, to mothers at the first official Mother’s Day celebrated at Andrew’s Methodist Church in Grafton, West Virginia. That same day a service was held at a church in Philadelphia. In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson made Mother’s Day, the second Sunday in May, an official national holiday.
In a flash the day became a commercial bonanza. Now it is second only to Christmas for the purchase of cards and gifts. It is the busiest day of the year for restaurants. Florists make much money. This commercialization of the holiday did not please Anna M. Jarvis, and she spent years of her life working to repeal the holiday she had worked to create. In the 1930s, she was arrested for disturbing the peace as she protested an American War Mother’s sale of flowers. (www.mothersdaycentral.com/about-mothersday/history/ )
I say: It is time we reconnect Mother’s Day to its true purpose, a day to advocate for peace and reconciliation. After Mother’s Day Sunday, after children and husbands serve their mothers and wives breakfast in bed, after the gifts have been given, after dinner out, we ought to extend Mother’s Day to Mother’s Day Monday. On this day, mothers all over the world ought to take to the streets and demand an end to war. We ought to demand an end to structural violence that produces economic disparity which is the root cause of violent conflict. We ought to do this in solidarity with Celeste Zappala and every mother who has lost a child to the violence of foreign wars and the violence in our own streets. As Julia Ward Howe’s Mother’s Day Proclamation says: “
Arise, then, women of this day!
Arise all women who have hearts, whether our baptism be of water or of tears!
This is a clarion call for all of humanity to end the insanity of violence, especially the madness of war. Happy Mother’s Day.
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