It's War Too

I am an admitted pop-culture junkie. Love the reality TV, the celebrity gossip, music, film and most everything else that sweeps up the masses. So while I didn’t watch it all (I swear), I did check in with the Emmy’s the other night and saw Sally Field get bleeped.

If you don’t know what I am talking about – good on you for reading literature or meditating or sleeping through it – but basically, she was censored for saying a bad word.

Sally said some compelling things in her speech which most of the media is NOT talking about. She said or something like: "May (mothers) be seen, may their work be valued and raised... especially the mothers who stand with an open heart and wait -- wait for their children to come home from danger, from harm's way and from war."

And then she said (and even though it was not aired, you could have guessed it): “If mothers ran the goddamn world, there would be no wars.”

I like Sally Field, I really do. (I once watched her dance -- with Andy Garcia -- to a Cuban band I was working with in LA and she looked great enough for me to be alternatingly jealous and happy.) And I don’t like war, I really, really don’t. But with regard to that one line, that news-ticker money maker, I gotta beg to differ.

I know what she was implying: it's beyond words the pain of a woman who buries her son or daughter killed in combat. But there's more to it than that.

If she was suggesting that women are better mediators or negotiators, that might be true. God knows, we chicks like to talk. We are experts at saying aggressive things to one another in about a thousand friendly ways – and we almost never come to blows afterward. We are all for non-violence: just think about how many times we say “hands are for holding.”

But have you seen a mother bear defend her cubs? Usually someone dies. Threaten our kids, our homes, our everything? Most mothers will fight like the crazed Ninja killers they never knew they were.

Engage us en masse? We can organize in a second. Consider the moms with sick kids who team up over broadband with other moms to advocate for and actually make change in the medical community. Consider the moms in crime-ridden neighborhoods who raise fists to the infiltrators killing folks in their communities. Consider the moms with children in foreign conflicts who fight for effective battle armour in the military community. Consider how quickly you can figure out childcare for a mom who’s sick in your OWN community.

Do we start conflicts? Not so much, at least not so much historically, but history also has many examples of fierce and blood-thirsty warrior women, many of them mothers. Motherhood is not for wimps. And when one of us loses one of our own to war (or Autism or cancer or drunk driving) we rage against the machine with such a ferocity, the entire world feels it.

That’s war too. And a good and worthy fight for sure.