Anti-War Mothers

Celebrating Mother's Day in the US

I refuse to raise my child to grow up to kill another mother’s child. -Julia Ward Howe, founder of Mother’s Day, 1870

Originally conceived as a protest to war, Mother’s Day – celebrated in the US on the second Sunday of May – has become a marketing tool to boost consumer spending to give suck to Amazon and FTD florists. Now that Rosie the Riveter, maker of fighter planes and tanks, is the face of feminism, we tend to forget that many of the early feminists were anti-war activists who had a deep respect for motherhood. 

Feminism has been hijacked by politics, and in the US, the great achievements of the Democratic Party – which allegedly cares more about women’s rights than the other half of the Uniparty – has lately won for female kind two weeks of parental leave, better access to daycare, and private breast-pumping spaces.

When I was nursing my son, I refused to be pumped like a cow in a factory farm. Why isn’t breast-feeding anywhere in public completely okay? That’s what boobs are for. Why would a woman want a few lousy weeks maternity leave? I’m proud of the multiyear lacuna in my résumé. I think government just wants a woman working outside the home in order to tax her pay and the pay of the housekeeper, babysitter, and take-out food cooks. 

Early feminists did not ignore the biological differences between women and men that led to women working in the home without pay and men outside of the home for pay. Instead, they fought for shared property rights for wives and husbands and equal inheritance for their daughters and sons.

Just as importantly, early feminists sought to raise the bar for mothers as educators. In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft made education the centerpiece of the first published defense of the rights (and responsibilities) of women. This makes sense because, as the lactating parent, women were also responsible for the crucial early education of the entire human race. 

Unfortunately, by the time of the run up to World War 2.0 – as Virginia Woolf famously noted with trepidation – just as more women were beginning to attend university, universities were becoming military R&D centers and business networking hubs and were losing sight of the value of a liberal education in the sciences, humanities, culture, and critical thinking.

After we got infant formula and birth control, women really began to swell the ranks of men. These days women, like men, fight to occupy the upper levels of the great corporate pyramid schemes. And more and more women are proud to exercise the hard-won privilege of lobbing mortars at meat targets in illegal wars that drain the middle-class economy. 

Aping an aggressive male militarist, Hillary Clinton, that 21st century feminist par excellence, gleefully bragged, “We came; we saw; he died,” referring to the brutal rapey knife murder of Gaddafi, who had dared to try to make Libya independent of the US dollar. That marked the low point for the women’s movement for me. 

Men as much as women are victimized by militarism and authoritarianism. 

Everything that was wrong with the paternalistic family unit, which had denied women their human rights, has been imprinted upon society as a whole. You will own nothing, says the World Economic Forum. At its strongest, the US had a robust ownership economy, made up of small businesses, family farms, and privately-owned homes. This made the US rich and independent and its people difficult to oppress.    

Since the lockdowns, family-owned and cooperatively-owned businesses are really going extinct. BlackRock is buying up homes, preventing US citizens from building equity and making us powerless in the hands of rent-seekers.

So What Do We Do Now? 

By the time peasants, Blacks and women all finally got the vote, practically everyone was already locked in a paternalistic power structure in which a few people at the top made decisions for everybody about economics, health, and culture. 

And how we vote does not make a bit of difference. It seems unlikely that we are going to be able to vote our way out of this predicament. The game is fixed; the elections are rigged. 

But maybe, just maybe there is hope for a great populist revolution, if moms go into she-bear mode and engage in civil disobedience like the world has never seen. 

I don’t want a new party. I don’t want political reform. I don’t want a demagogue. I want power decentralized. I want peace.

I ran for US congress in 2020, and had I succeeded, I would have voted no on every bill; the laws that have accreted since our Constitution was ratified have served mainly to empower the few. I would have the Federal government do nothing but collect tariffs and build our infrastructure with Treasury-issued Greenbacks. That is, government would be the people’s Buildings and Grounds Department. After all, the people own the country.   

If I had my way, all the “domestic engineers” at the local level would be able to call up the Treasury and let them know what we need for our public infrastructure and where to send the payments. 

Being thus apolitical, I now consult for a super PAC supporting Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for president because I think he is not afraid of a powerful citizenry who, given the opportunity, will take back ownership of the country. He’s sued government and big corporations. I like that about him. And I think he’ll ultimately heed the words that I’ve heard him repeat, violence only begets more violence.   

His running mate, Nicole Shanahan, got political when she realized her daughter suffered a vaccine injury. Now Shanahan is dedicating her time and considerable wealth to restoring the health of the country by liberating food and medicine from government/corporate control. 

Women tend to become political when they have kids and start noticing how messed up the world is. This happened to me. I had never even bothered to vote before the birth of my son, and the next thing I knew, I was fighting Federal school lunch policies and various suspect ideas about how to approach education, which made schools function as pipelines to prison, military, and/or corporate industry. 

I wrote a political satire about my experiences with my local school board and in that novel Locus Amoenus, which was nominated for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, I also tied Big Agriculture to Big Government and the War on Terror. I realized something was rotten in the United States of America, where health, happiness and freedom have been traded for cheap Walmart goods, pharmaceuticals, endless war, standard curriculum, and environmental degradation.

I discovered that I did not want the government to protect my child; I wanted the government to stop harming my child. I ended up homeschooling him and started farming. I am decidedly not a fan of government fixes. I didn’t know that about myself until I had a child. 

I mourn for all the mothers who have lost their children to wars, to vaccine injury, to obesity-related disease, to toxic water and soil. Unfortunately, there are a lot of women who have suffered such tragedies. I feel a populist uprising brewing with at least half the population ready to take back our country.

I hope the men join us.