FW: MOTHERS' DAY: Julia Ward Howe's Proclamation, Mothers doing what?, William Butler Yeats: The Second Coming

 

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From: Ed Pearl [mailto:epearlag@earthlink.net]
Sent: Sunday, May 13, 2012 7:31 AM
To: Ed Pearl
Subject: MOTHERS' DAY: Julia Ward Howe's Proclamation, Mothers doing what?, William Butler Yeats: The Second Coming

A Happy and Thoughtful Mothers Day to all.  I've added the Yeats poem as appropriate accompanyment to

Julia Ward Howe's Proclamtion. 

 

 

Mother's Day Proclamation
by Julia Ward Howe, 1870

Arise, then... women of this day! Arise, all women
who have hearts, whether
your baptism be that of water or of tears!

We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant
agencies. Our sons shall
not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been
able to teach them of
charity, mercy and patience...

As men have often forsaken the plough and 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 then solemnly take counsel with each other as
to the means whereby the
great human family can live in peace... to promote the
alliance of the different
nationalities, the amicable settlement of
international questions, the great and
general interests of peace.

--Julia Ward Howe, 1870 

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Mothers doing what?

 

San Francisco Chronicle

Ruth Rosen Thursday, May 8, 2003

 

THIS SUNDAY IS Mother's Day. Restaurants are already booked for brunches and

dinners. The flower, candy and card industries await their annual spike in

sales.

 

This is soooo 20th century. The women who conceived Mother's Day would be

bewildered by our rituals. They would expect us to be marching in the

streets, not honored for our individual sacrifices.

 

That's because the idea of a mother's day began with women's public

activism. In 1858, Anna Reeve Jarvis, a young Appalachian homemaker,

organized Mothers' (not Mother's) Work Days in West Virginia to improve the

sanitation and decrease the deaths caused by polluted water.

 

In 1872, Julia Ward Howe, author of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic,"

proposed an annual Mothers' Day for Peace. Horrified by the casualties of

the American Civil and Franco-Prussian wars, Howe asked, "Why do not the

mothers of mankind interfere in these matters to prevent the waste of that

human life of which they alone bear and know the cost?"

 

For the next 30 years, Americans celebrated Mothers' Day for Peace on June

2. In 1907, Anna Jarvis, the daughter of the original West Virginian

organizer, launched a campaign to establish a national Mother's Day. Heavily lobbied by

the flower and card industries, Congress declared in 1914 that Mother's Day

would be celebrated on the second Sunday in May.

 

But the holiday did not last as a day to promote peace. The growing consumer

culture gradually redefined Mother's Day as a celebration of each woman's

private sacrifices. As the Florists' Review, a trade journal, so bluntly put

it, "This was a holiday that could be exploited."

 

And so it was. The embryonic advertising industry taught Americans how to

honor their mothers -- by buying flowers. Outraged by florists, who sold

each carnation for the exorbitant price of $1, Anna Jarvis tried to fight

against those who "would undermine Mother's Day with their greed."

 

Clearly, she failed. But growing numbers of women have been resurrecting her

mother's 19th-century vision of Mother's Day. On Sunday, in Washington and

15 other American cities, thousands of women are holding peace rallies and

parades. In Albuquerque, Boulder, Cincinnati and Los Angeles, for example,

"Mothers Acting Up" have organized events to promote peaceful solutions to

conflict.

 

Closer to home, women in the Bay Area are sponsoring two Mother's Day peace

celebrations, both meant to entertain and engage the entire family. On

Saturday, dozens of interfaith, peace and justice organizations are

sponsoring a "Mother's Day Speak-up for Peace" event at 1 p.m. in Lindley

Meadow, in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.

 

Between 1 and 3 p.m. on Sunday, at Berkeley's Martin Luther King Jr.

Memorial Park (at Martin Luther King Jr. Way and Center Street), folksinger

Betsy Rose will be joined by musicians and poets, followed by prayers and

reflections for peace.

 

In addition to promoting peace, some women activists are using Mother's Day

as an occasion to publicize the fact that our nation reveres the idea of

motherhood more than actual mothers.

 

According to Save the Children's annual index, which measures the well-

being of mothers and children, the U.S. ranks 11th among 117 other

countries. We may be a military superpower, but we resemble a developing

nation when when it comes to providing mothers with child care, job

training, health care, an adequate minimum wage and paid parental leave.

Nineteenth-century women dared to dream of a day that encourages women to

use their influence to promote peace. At the dawn of a new century, we can

best honor their vision with our own civic engagement and activism. .

 

For Bay Area Mother's Day information: <www.unitedforpeace.org/ and

www.peacehost.net/EPI-Calc/

 

E-mail Ruth Rosen at <rrosen@sfchronicle.com

 

* * *

 

From: Sharon Cotrell

The Second Coming : poem by William Butler Yeats

Hi All,

These days I often think of this poem--particularly these lines:

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."


"And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

If I remember correctly, Yeats wrote this in the early 1930s-worried about
the growth of facism.

What is ahead of us?

Sharon

http://www.interlog.com/~gilgames/pyeats1.htm

The Second Coming

By William Butler Yeats


TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?


Poetry


Craig Space

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