Carry On, Carry On, As if Nothing Really Matters...

You may know that Mother's Day in the United States was intended as a day for Mother's to unite in opposition to war. That sounds like something dirty hippies would do. It was- dirty, Sunday school teaching, Methodist, hippies.

Of course, you can't run a country if you have a day set aside to publicly oppose war, so when Mother's Day became a nationally recognized holiday it was promoted as a day to fly a flag honoring those mothers who lost children to war. Well, actually, it wasn't for all mothers who lost children in war, it was for mothers who lost sons in war. Well, again, not all mothers who lost sons in war, mothers who lost sons who were soldiers in war. Well, no, not that either. Mothers who lost soldier-sons on "our side" in war.

Again, you can't run a country if you think about the actual consequences of a war. So Mother's Day became an opportunity to honor an abstraction, and there is little easier to abstract than the dead.

The Dead.

But then, these days, if you're a soldier you're much less likely to die in combat than you were in the good old days of the first Mother's Day. These days, only one in fifteen American soldiers (or one in five for infantry in super wars) become war casualties. The training is very good. It is, after all, a soldiers job to take life, not give it. And our medical technology is so great that injuries are less likely to result in death. Hoorays all around. The point being we have fewer dead to honor and it would be self-defeating to honor the amputated, brain-damaged, burned, paralyzed, divorced, and addicted. Understand that correctly, there are plenty of dead. We are a well-trained, well-supplied, efficient machine. There are just few dead that we would honor.

So there you go.

Or not.

Anna Jarvis, the daughter of the mother that tried to start the hippy mother's day was appalled at what the holiday had become and worked to have people remember what it was originally for. She thought it had become an ideological monster completely at odds with what her mother intended the day to be. But screw her, right?

I mean, if she had her way we wouldn't have what we have today: something that everyone can love and get behind. There's nothing ideologically coercive about a day that's as meaningful to a four year old nobody as it is to a 61 year old president. It's completely harmless. Totally neutral. It doesn't disturb a thing, and that sounds exactly like what we need these days.

If you'd like to learn more about the history of Mother's Day, visit your local library, or if tax cuts and public neglect have left you without a local library, use the wikipedias like a normal person.