It seems that much like continental drift we have holiday drift, whereby holidays drift from original purpose to another, often Hallmark-driven, end. Follow me below the spilled orange juice on the breakfast tray after a word from our sponsor...
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Think of Mother's Day today, and it's a full-fledged Hallmark Holiday. An entire industry of handmade-in-school presents, expensive jewelry, flowers, chocolates, cards, restaurant meals and NPR Fundraising Opportunities exist with the sole purpose of making Mom feel loved. Never mind that the other 364 days - and often today as well - she's regarded with the same taken for granted attitude a prior generation took servants.
Social activist Ann Reeves Jarvis began "Mothers’ Day Work Clubs" 1858 to improve health and sanitary conditions, trying to lower infant mortality by fighting disease and curbing milk contamination. Her death in 1905 inspired her daughter Anna Jarvis to organize the first Mother's Day observances in 1908. President Woodrow Wilson recognized it as an official holiday in 1914. The rapid commercialization of the holiday caused Anna Jarvis by the early 1920s to urge people to stop buying flowers and candy:
A printed card means nothing except that you are too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world. And candy! You take a box to Mother—and then eat most of it yourself. A pretty sentiment.
In 1870, abolitionist, social activist and author of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic"
Julia Ward Howe wrote the "Appeal to womanhood across the world" (later known as the
Mother's Day Proclamation) as an appeal for women to unite for world peace in reaction to the carnage of the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War. She wanted a Mother's Day For Peace established on June 2, but was unsuccessful, and our current Mother's Day is solely the result of Anna Jarvis' effort. Because it speaks so strongly to the idea of peace, I'm ending tonight with the Proclamation. Please, read it in the context of the era and remember that JWH was a Unitarian Christian and wrote as such:
Again, in the sight of the Christian world, have the skill and power of two great nations exhausted themselves in mutual murder. Again have the sacred questions of international justice been committed to the fatal mediation of military weapons. In this day of progress, in this century of light, the ambition of rulers has been allowed to barter the dear interests of domestic life for the bloody exchanges of the battle field. Thus men have done. Thus men will do. But women need no longer be made a party to proceedings which fill the globe with grief and horror. Despite the assumptions of physical force, the mother has a sacred and commanding word to say to the sons who owe their life to her suffering. That word should now be heard, and answered to as never before.
Arise, then, Christian women of this day ! Arise, all women who have hearts, Whether your baptism be that of water or of tears ! Say firmly : We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. 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, women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country, to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. From the bosom of the 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 out dishonor, nor violence vindicate 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 council.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take council with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, man as the brother of man, each bearing after his own kind the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.
In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women, without limit of nationality, may be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient, and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.
Keep all this in mind next year. I'd FAR rather the holidays those women tried to establish than the Hallmark Hell we've got now, to be brutally honest. How about you?
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From white blitz:
Oh this is a wonderful response by Katakana to the hateful racist in charge of the Georgia Christian private school. From xxdr zombiexx's School Principal's racist meltdown:"Look who's leaving: All the Black People".
From RockyMtnLib:
This comment by gramofsam1 capsulizes everything important about police brutality in America. From xxdr zombiexx's Black Man calls cops to report home invasion. What happened?.
From foresterbob:
The supposed military takeover of Texas has conspiracy theorists in a tizzy. In order to get worked up about a map that's being used in a military exercise, you have to begin with the premise that the map was drawn by someone who was dead-serious about the mission.
Here, from Spider Stumbled, is a first-hand account of how a training map is made.
From Ian Reifowitz's GOP presidential candidates blow their 'Sister Souljah' moment to denounce right-wing extremism.
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