It Starts with Mothers

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'Look what Casey has started. I see and feel him in all of your eyes. I'm not ashamed to say that Camp Casey is a place where you can come and feel love. When I nursed him, I promised him that I would never let him go to war. I broke that promise to him. I can't bear for another mother to go through the pain that I'm going through. And that is the only reason that I'm doing what I'm doing. We are millions of people strong and the mothers are saying, 'No, I am not giving my sons to you.''
-- Cindy Sheehan, August 24, 2005, Crawford, Texas

About a year and a half ago, my 19-year-old son, Oliver, said something that has haunted me. When I asked him why kids his age weren't taking more initiative in opposing the war, he said, 'This time, it has to start with mothers.'

It turns out Oliver was right. When Julia Ward Howe wrote her Mother's Day Proclamation in 1870, she declared that 'we women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.' As Oliver and I discovered when we went to Crawford, Texas, Cindy Sheehan is modeling that tenderness. The love between a bereaved mother and her dead son is palpable.

It is time for the sensibility that galvanized Cindy Sheehan to arouse in all of us, men and women, the protective forces of the tigress and the mother bear. It's time to end the occupation of Iraq and for the fierce feminine qualities of love, compassion, and nurturing to dictate public policy. It's time to open our eyes and our hearts to all the suffering in our own country -- suffering exposed by Hurricane Katrina. It's time to move past our fears and into action on behalf of the earth and all her children.

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