Did you know that Julia Ward Howe also wrote the Battle Hymn of the Republic?  Women of that era who suffered through the Civil War, knew just as we do today that matters of war and peace are never simple.  It's easy to read the Mother's Day Proclamation and think of it as a naive sentiment, but really looking back at Julia Ward Howe's life, I think she and her contemporaries well knew just how much they were asking.

Happy Mother's Day to all the Mothers Who Talk, and to all the other moms out there.

I realize that this is the third year in a row that I've posted Julia Ward Howe's beautiful Mother's Day Proclamation.  Well, there's still a war going on, so why stop now?

You may already know this, but I'll repeat it anyway:  This is not a Hallmark holiday.  It's an activist holiday, founded by women who had lost sons in the civil war.  

Julia Ward Howe, activist, abolitionist and poet, made this Mother's Day Proclamation in 1870.

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."

I agree, Julia.  I agree.

The war in Iraq ad its victims are there in the back of my mind like a nasty bruise that hurts when I press it by accident, but is not something I re-injure daily. It is a source of pain and shame and dread when I do think about it, but I don’t discuss it with many people, partially because it’s not part of my daily reality, partly because I almost feel it unseemly to play war pundit when I have absolutely nothing at risk in this fight.

But occasionally, it pops out and this time I want to talk about it with you. In this month’s Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens writes an essay about the death of Mark Jennings Daily, a soldier from Irvine, California who died in Mosul in January. Daily was 23, and left behind a family and a wife of 15 months. Tragic. But the reason why Hitchens wrote this essay is because Daily noted on his MySpace page that one of the reasons he volunteered for war was Hitchens’ writings in support of invasion, particularly his "Fighting Words" column in Slate magazine. The sad, sick "nut graph" to this sorry essay:

I don't exaggerate by much when I say that I froze. I certainly felt a very deep pang of cold dismay. I had just returned from a visit to Iraq with my own son (who is 23, as was young Mr. Daily) and had found myself in a deeply pessimistic frame of mind about the war. Was it possible that I had helped persuade someone I had never met to place himself in the path of an I.E.D.? Over-dramatizing myself a bit in the angst of the moment, I found I was thinking of William Butler Yeats, who was chilled to discover that the Irish rebels of 1916 had gone to their deaths quoting his play Cathleen ni Houlihan. He tried to cope with the disturbing idea in his poem "Man and the Echo":

Did that play of mine send out
Certain men the English shot? ...
Could my spoken words have checked
That whereby a house lay wrecked?

Abruptly dismissing any comparison between myself and one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, I feverishly clicked on all the links from the article and found myself on Lieutenant Daily's MySpace site, where his statement "Why I Joined" was posted. The site also immediately kicked into a skirling noise of Irish revolutionary pugnacity: a song from the Dropkick Murphys album Warrior's Code. And there, at the top of the page, was a link to a passage from one of my articles, in which I poured scorn on those who were neutral about the battle for Iraq ... I don't remember ever feeling, in every allowable sense of the word, quite so hollow.

UPDATE: Here's a link to watch Sally's unedited speech. It's from the Canadian broadcast, natch.

Just a quick post to state, for the record, my admiration for Sally Field. She has long been known for her heartfelt, slightly zany and off-the-cuff acceptance speeches.

Tonight, she won an Emmy award for her role on the ABC show Brothers and Sisters, which I've never seen. But after watching her jumbled, spontaneous and inexplicably controversial acceptance speech, I am highly inclined to tune in.

To recap, Field said her role was primarily that of a mother and dedicated her award to all the mothers of the world, especially those who wait for their children who are at war or in harm's way. "May their work be valued and raised," she said. She ended the speech by saying something to the effect of:

"And let's face it- if mothers ruled the world, there wouldn't be any goddamned wars in the first place!"

Not that any of us saw it or heard it, because the Fox censors didn't just bleep her-- they cut her off completely and cut away for a long silent shot, so viewers couldn't read her lips or hear any of the crowd reaction that followed.

The fallout was swift and predictable, as Field was deluged with questions about the bleeping as soon as she walked backstage. But my girl Gidget (LOVED that show!) held firm when informed that her offending comment had been censored:

''That's too bad. I wanted to say something about the mothers who wait for their military children to come home.... I don't care. I have no comment other than, 'Oh, well.' I said what I wanted to say. I honestly believe that if mothers ruled the world, we wouldn't be sending our children off to be slaughtered.... I probably shouldn't have said the 'God' in front of the 'damn.' I would've liked to have said more bleeped-out words, but that's life.''

What do you think? Is this the latest faux-controversy in a world that seems to thrive on it? Should Field have pulled her punches? How cool was it that America Ferrara, a young, beautiful, normal-sized Latina won best actress in a comedy series? And whose bizarre idea was it to stage the Emmys like a theater-in-the-round? Do I watch too much TV or what??

Every weekday morning, I drop my son off at preschool. As I continue on my way to work, I turn on the radio and hear about the latest horrors taking place a hemisphere away. While there is a great gulf between the violence in Iraq and my daily routine, there are also threads that tie them together. Two of the most influential preschool educational methods--Montessori and Reggio Emilia--were the by-products of war.

When Dr. Maria Montessori refused to turn the children in her schools into soldiers, Mussolini forced her into exile. Later, she fled Spain when the Spanish Civil War broke out. By 1949, Montessori had lived through two World Wars, and the pursuit of peace became the primary goal of her education model.

In 1932, Montessori addressed the International Bureau of Education in Geneva:

If a person were to grow up with a healthy soul, enjoying the full development of a strong character and a clear intellect, they could not endure to uphold two kinds of justice—the one protecting life and the other destroying it. Nor would they consent to cultivate in their heart both love and hate. Neither could they tolerate two disciplines—the one aimed at building, and the other at tearing down what has been built.

Better humans than we are would use their intellects and the attainments of civilization to end the fury of war. War would not be a problem for them at all. They would see it simply as a barbarous state, opposed to civilization—an absurd and incomprehensible phenomenon, as expendable and defeatable as the plague.

In 1931, Mahatma Ghandi and Maria Montessori met at the Montessori Training College in London. Gandhi personally taught all the children in his Ashrams using techniques similar to and inspired by the Montessori system.

I first observed a Montessori classroom in the early 90s, when my then-boyfriend's son began a Montessori preschool. My main impression was surprise that there were so many children packed in a room, each doing his or her own thing, yet chaos did not reign. Invisible rules seemed to guide the movements of the little comets. There were personal space delineations, and rituals to invite, accept, and decline play with others. Although I knew nothing of Montessori's ideas, I remember thinking that whatever was going on in the classroom would be beneficial to future denizens of a population-dense world. An intense amount of diverse independent activity was occuring harmoniously in close quarters. Maybe Maria was on to something...