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.

Cross-posted at Not My Tribe.

My siblings and I frequently talk about our "activist" upbringing. We grew up with parents who walked their talk. Our mom hung out with the radical nuns protesting around Rocky Flats. And I can’t remember a single Thanksgiving where we didn’t have a couple of homeless men sitting at our dinner table. Our parents introduced them by name and we were expected to be gracious and make interesting conversation.

Then there was Robin, a retarded young man who was obsessed with a pair of moccasins that we had in our front closet. My mom made a rule that the front door be always open so that Robin could come in for his moccasins whenever he wanted to. As a mother, I question the wisdom of this now but, at the time, we just accepted that at any time Robin might walk in and open our front closet. It wasn’t anything we worried about. Just another one of mom's people.

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...

Peace activitist Cindy Sheehan who became the public face of protest against the war in Iraq has decided to call it quits. Sheehan's son, Army Spc. Casey Sheehan was killed in an ambush in Baghdad in 2004. He was 24 years old. Soon after, his mother spent a month waiting outside President Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas for a meeting with him to discuss her son's death. The meeting never took place, but the vigil launched Sheehan into the spotlight where she remained until now.

On Memorial Day she posted a "letter of resignation" on DailyKos in which she explained her decision. Of the many reasons she cited, I found this the most distressing: