Arise, then, women of this day! Arise, all women who have breasts, Whether our baptism be of water or of tears! "We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies, Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs." It says: "Disarm!
Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice." Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war, Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Whereby the great human family can live in peace, Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask 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.
It's time again to celebrate the nurturing and loving woman -- man?
women? men? These are unusual times, eh?
-- who kissed that boo-boo when you were a child, cleaned up after that dog you swore to walk, helped you with that high-school hunk or cutie, and so on. Oh, mothers are indeed wonderful. Yours, especially, that's true.
But there are other mothers out there. Have been, for a long time, really. Don't believe it?
Here, then, we present ...
Circa 4.5 billion B.C.
(or circa 6000 B.C., depending on your viewpoint): Mother Earth is born.
Hippies and tree-huggers? Not yet. Circa 200,000 B.
C.: For the evolutionists, Mitochondrial Eve delivers unto Earth the progeny who would spawn today's entire population. The mother of humanity gets neither gifts nor a day off.
Circa 24,000 B.C.: Paleolithic people living in the region that would become Austria carve a figure of a, um, corpulent nude female.
The "Venus of Willendorf" -- aka "Ur-Eve" -- is later thought by many male paleontologists to pay homage to moms, including Mom Earth. Circa 10,000 B.C.
to circa 300 B.C. (or thereabouts; these things can be hard to decipher): Ancient cultures go ga-ga for mom deities, whether of fertility, breast-feeding, Earth or whatever.
Isis, Neith, Heget, and Taweret fly high in Egypt; Bona Dea, Ceres, Cybele, Larenta, Libera, Quiritis, Rumina and Tellus all do in Rome as Romans do unto them; and Demeter, Gaia, Hera and Rhea get the Greek treatment. Circa 4004 B.C.
: For the biblically inclined, Eve delivers unto Earth the first son, Cain. She later delivers the second son, Abel. Not surprisingly, as any mother will attest, the sons fight.
Circa 4 B.C. or 0 A.
D.: Mary of Galilee gives birth to Jesus, and becomes forever known as Mother Mary. Centuries later, Beatles singer-songwriter Paul McCartney, in times of trouble, would implore her to come to him.
Circa 1600 . She will go on to become "Mother Teresa." No joke.
1910: Noted psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud coins the term "Oedipal complex," largely to describe the one-way competition a son might engage in with a father for the affections of the mother/wife. Sons everywhere rethink their Mother's Day gifts. 1914: President Woodrow Wilson, still riding high from his electoral trouncing of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft two years earlier, signs a proclamation officially designating the second Sunday in May to forever after be known as Mother's Day.
He would go on to win a second term in office. Coincidence? 1926: U.
S. Route 66, stretching from Chicago to Los Angeles, is formally opened. While novelist John Steinbeck would call it the "Mother Road" in his 1939 "The Grapes of Wrath," actress wannabes from across the Midwest would come to view it more as the "highway out of here.
" 1962: On May 5, the International Mother's Day Shrine incorporates in perhaps-perennially-tiny Grafton, W.Va. -- population: now a whopping 5,400 -- by recasting the Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church, built in 1873.
They go on to dub it as the "Mother Church of Mother's Day." Insert your own "mother of all marketing" joke here. 1964: Frank Zappa launches The Mothers of Invention, a rock 'n' roll band.
Necessity is never explicitly mentioned, although Zappa would go on to be oft-accused of explicitly mentioning many things. 1971: Mother Nature makes a rare and surprise appearance on television, pitching soft-whipped margarine, of all things. She would reprise her role repeatedly (in the guise of actress Dena Dietrich) through 1979, after which it apparently became OK to fool Mother Nature.
1976: Bill Cosby stars as Mother, a brash, rule-breaking ambulance driver in the non-Oscar-winning "Mother, Jugs and Speed." Ironically, Raquel Welch, herself a mother, nabbed a different title role in the movie. You guess which.
1991: Saddam Hussein, Iraqi dictator, warns that any military invasion of his country, as threatened by the United States and United Nations, would result in "the mother of all wars." 2005: "How I Met Your Mother," a CBS sitcom that in no way resembles the mega-popular "Friends" sitcom that just ended its decade-plus run on NBC, hits the airwaves. And legions of fans -- both of you, judging by the ratings -- anxiously wait to see just how he met said mother.
Last modified: May 13. 2007 4:45AM
Yes, it's Mother's Day. It's time again to celebrate the nurturing and loving woman -- man?
women? men? These are unusual times, eh?
-- who kissed that boo-boo when you were a child, cleaned up . . .
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