| Mother's Day Peace Rally "Say No to War" Organized by Women Against Military Madness (WAMM) |  |
| Mother's Day Peace Rally "Say No to War" Organized by Women Against Military Madness (WAMM) | |
The room was filled with mothers, daughters, sons and fathers, grandfathers, grandmothers, aunties and uncles. It was a great day for a peace rally(an indoor peace rally that is!!). What better place to come together to share stories and sing for peace than Powderhorn Park. Over 200 faces adorned the Mother's Day Card for Peace which read, "Happy Mother's Day - Working towards the day when no mother will send her child off to war".
Did you know that Mother's Day celebrations were originally intended to be a "Healing of Nations"? Yes, in fact Mrs. Anna Reiss Jarvis, the “Mother of Mother’s Day” started these celebrations back in the 1900’s with the belief that "the scars of the civil war could be healed if mothers were treated with respect." One of the organizers of WAMM agreed with Ms. Jarvis and stated, "My love of my country doesn't stop at the border". Listen to the original proclamation of Mother's Day by Julie Ward Howe:
 Arise, then, women of this day!Arise all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of fears! 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 indicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plow 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 counsel. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, And each bearing after her own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.
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Before hearing stories from the speakers, the "Greenery Girls" sang a few songs. The lyrics alone were uplifting:
Well may the world go when I'm far away.... God are you a woman?... I've dreamed on this mountain since I was my mother's daughter, you can't take my dreams away...and the song written after 9-11, - Make sense of it all...
One of the speakers, Ruth Rosenbloom spoke to the group about her organization, "Peaceful Tomorrows - September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows". The name of their organization was inspired by Martin Luther King who said, "War is a poor chisel for carving out peaceful tomorrows...".
Ruth's youngest brother was killed in the World Trade Towers on 9-11 - his name was Joshua. Joshua was planning to get married just days after 9-11. In fact, his fiancée, who worked in the same building as Joshua, didn't show up for work that morning, because she took the day off to plan for the wedding. Joshua's fiancée, Gina, and Gina's daughter survived 9-11, but are now without their loved one. Yes it was a very tragic event. Ruth is still grieving the loss of her brother, but there's one thing she can't have when it comes to this pain, and that's the creation of more pain, more violence and more loss of innocent life through retaliation via her own country.
When Ruth saw how our country was responding to this attack of violence - she said, "NO". She and many other families who lost loved ones in 9-11 joined together to form Peaceful Tomorrows for the purpose of "seek(ing) effective nonviolent responses to terrorism, and identify(ing) a commonality with all people similarly affected by violence throughout the world. By conscientiously exploring peaceful options in our search for justice, the founders of Peaceful Tomorrows choose to spare additional innocent families the suffering that they have already experienced - as well as to break the endless cycle of violence and retaliation engendered by war." Check out Peaceful Tomorrows website at: peacefultomorrows.org.
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