In Honor of Mothers, Forgotten

This is Mother’s Day and most families will be celebrating – giving mothers flowers, candy, cards, gifts, taking them out to dinner or cooking for them. It is a day when all mothers are clumped into one idealized bundle.

In the bundle there are mostly female, married women with children. The bundle draws attention primarily to the women who have “made the cut” according to society’s definition of what a mother, and a good mother at that, is.

But the truth of the matter is that there are a lot of mothers who should be acknowledged as well, even if they have not made the cut. There are the grandmothers who are acting as mothers for their grandchildren. There are the men, some widowed, some divorced, and some in same-gender loving relationships, who are mothers.

And then there are the forgotten mothers, the women who gave birth to babies but who were strung out on drugs or who for some reason are homeless, their children having been taken away. Nobody ever mentions them or thinks about them…but they exist.

And today, I stop to wonder how they are doing.

There are the women who, by virtue of having given birth, are mothers, but who, either years ago or maybe just this week, have given their newborns away because for some reason, they cannot keep them.

I wonder how they are doing.

There are mothers who are working two, three jobs to make sure their children are taken care of. Because they are single mothers, some black and brown, but not all, society spits on them and castigates them. Society blames all of its ills on single mothers.

I was a single mother, and I resent the categorization of single mothers as being somehow deficient.

How are those mothers doing, mothers who are so tired they can hardly hold their eyes open, but who are determined to do so because they love their children just as much as do married women with children?

Today I’m going to do something different. I am going to visit some of the forgotten mothers. I am going to sit with them and talk with them and let them know that they matter. The mothers may be female or they may be men who have stepped into the role of mother. It doesn’t matter their sex. What matters is their love for children.

There are too many forgotten mothers doing extraordinary jobs at being mothers, and there are too many forgotten mothers, sitting in places of despair because they feel unworthy or guilty or ashamed …or maybe all of those things. Some are sitting in homeless shelters, some may be on the streets, trying to make money so they can feed their children or perhaps make enough money to buy medicine for those children. Some may not have access to computers so they can put a nice tribute to their mothers online.

Some may be sitting in church with big hats, trying to forget their pain.

There are women who are mothers who have not been very good at it, women who were abused growing up and who abuse their children as well. There are some people who were just not cut out to be mothers. Just because you can have a child does not mean you are meant to be a mother.

But there are many others who had their babies and who are struggling to make ends meet, or struggling to get past their demons, or who are caught in places because of life. Everyone isn’t taught that life ain’t been no crystal stair. When bad things happen, they think it’s because of them, because of some deficiency in them. They don’t know that trials and challenges are non-discriminatory.

Mother’s Day indeed. This one, for me, will be different. All mothers count. Today, I think I need to remember that there are too many people called “mother” or who are in the role of mother, who have been forgotten. That seems, somehow, not right.

A candid observation …

Tamar Rice’s Life Reduced to Money

When the news report told the world that the family of Tamir Rice, the unarmed, 12-year-old African American boy who was shot to death by police officers, had been awarded $6 million by the city of Cleveland, I was sick. And angry. (http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/25/us/tamir-rice-settlement/)

I was sick because once again, a family received money but not justice. The officers who killed Tamir Rice were not charged with his murder. Although they rode up on this young boy, who was holding a toy pellet gun, probably scaring him half to death, and shot him within seconds, they were able to give the standard “I was in fear for my life” line and they got off. Timothy Loehmann, the officer who fired the fatal shot is still on the police force, still on the streets.

Under the terms of the settlement, the city of Cleveland admits no wrong and the family has agreed to drop criminal charges against the two officers involved in the tragedy. (http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/35793-tamir-rice-s-family-gets-6-million-settlement-for-police-killing-of-12-year-old)

The whole scenario, one which is repeated over and over in this country, makes me sick.

But I was angry because there is a disconnect between the cry of what “taxpayers” complain about and what they are willing to spend millions of dollars for. “Taxpayers,” which seems to be code for “white” taxpayers, are willing to pay millions of dollars to families of victims of police violence and brutality, and they are also willing to pay millions to keep people, too many of whom are black, poor …and innocent of violent crime – in prison. They are willing to pay millions of dollars to build prisons but not willing to put that same amount of money into building quality schools in urban neighborhoods. They are willing to pay millions of dollars to families of murdered children, but not willing to pay millions to expand Medicaid so that poor people can have access to health care.

It is sickening.

If it were my child who had been murdered as had been Tamir Rice or John Crawford, or Mike Brown …no amount of money would be enough. I would not want money. In the absence of my child, killed unjustly, I would want justice. I would want some court, somewhere, to make the police pay for what they had done. I would want a movement started that would demand all police departments go through some kind of training, something , to make it so they would have to stop killing unarmed black people. I would want it and I would want it bad.

I wouldn’t care about the money. The hell with the money.

Whenever a loved one is murdered, the ones left behind want justice. It is a normal human reaction and need, but it seems that this society doesn’t understand that the continued lack of justice for families of victims shot by police only creates more anger, anguish and pain for survivors.

This society doesn’t understand and doesn’t care. That is the nucleus, the center of the pain that the African American community carries and has carried for literally generations. From the time when whites could hunt down and kill escaped slaves legally, to the countless times when blacks were tried by white judges in front of all-white juries, many times for crimes the judge and jury knew they hadn’t committed, this travesty and absence of justice has been a reason for a deep-seated anger and pain for African-Americans.

To add insult to injury, the head of the Cleveland police union, Steve Loomis, had the audacity to suggest that perhaps the family of Tamir Rice would use a part of the money they receive to “educate” children on the dangers of mishandling either toy or real guns. Loomis said he wants something positive to come out of Tamir’s death.

Seriously. The police department of Cleveland, which murdered Tamir Rice, now wants to dictate how the family of this child should spend money they received?

White supremacy, which has deluded white people into thinking that they are superior and that if a black person is shot by police, he or she deserved it, is a sickness. It is a mental illness, and those afflicted, need help and treatment. To think that any family would be satisfied with money after losing a child, is the height of arrogance and racism.

It is insulting and is, frankly, a troubling …candid observation.

Prince

It’s funny how we believe some people will just …be around forever.

Prince died today and one of the comments I heard over and over as I walked on the streets of New York City was “he wasn’t supposed to die.”

The death of the 57-year-old musical genius stunned just about everyone. He did a concert last week in Atlanta. A friend of mine went and called; said he was “the bomb.” My friend was exhilarated, excited, inspired and filled. She said she was ready to face the world.

She called me this evening. “How did this happen?” she asked. “I mean, not how, but why …I mean…what happened?”

I of course had no answers, but his death gave me pause. We take being alive for granted. We take being alive and being healthy …for granted. And we take it for granted that the people we love will be around for as long as we need for them to be. We will not venture into the reality of life – meaning, that if one lives, one will surely die, and nobody knows when. We act rather like little kids in many ways, who cannot see past their own selves.

With our celebrities, the people who make us smile at their humor, or weep because of their music, make us try harder because we honor their success and their talent, we kind of forget that they are human, and are subject to the part of life called death. We cannot bear it, really, so we ignore it. We absorb their gifts to us, always wanting more.

When Michael Jackson died, and Whitney Houston, we…well, I …was sad because they were gone, yes, but also because they would not be alive to make any more of the music I loved so much.

And now, Prince.

The passing of Prince makes me understand how we take for granted the lives of those to whom we are close, and our own lives as well. It is not promised that we will see tomorrow, or live through the day.

Maybe Prince’s death should jostle us and make us understand that he gave a lot in his life and that we should perhaps, even as we mourn, work on giving as much of ourselves and our gifts as we can, while we can.

Maybe that would be the best way to honor …the artist formerly known as ..and then was again …Prince.

A candid observation.

Donald Trump’s Whining Shows his Ignorance

The system of electing a president has been the same …since the days the Founding Fathers set up the system.

So, why is Donald Trump complaining that the system isn’t fair?

It might be unfair, true, but it is the system and it has been in place …forever.

Donald is crying and whining that the system is rigged against him. But it isn’t.

The Founding Fathers made it so that presidents are ultimately chosen by the Electoral College. Whoever gets the most electoral votes is the winner.

It’s a winner-take-all system. So, the trick is to win as much of the popular vote as possible. That way, even if you get just a hair’s breath majority of the popular vote, you get all of the electoral votes of any given state.

Each state gets as many electors as it has congresspersons and senators. Larger states have more electors.

I suppose this is a democratic way of voting. It doesn’t feel like “one man, one vote” is the reality here. Democracy as I understand it goes out of the window when it comes to the ways America has worked to suppress the votes of many, especially African-Americans. Gerrymandering seems to me to be dishonorable; it keeps “the establishment” in power, and it works against the people and their needs and demands.

The money it takes to get elected to the White House is, well, unforgivable. In 2012, the presidential election cost $2 billion. Some believe that this year’s election will cost up to $5 billion. (http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/02/historic-price-cost-presidential-elections)

How many schools could we build for that amount of money? How many contaminated water pipes in Flint could be replaced? How many services for people in need could be funded by that kind of money?

The system is crazy. It feels unfair. It feels like people’s votes are negated. It leaves a lot of room for the votes of some to be suppressed, and has led to that in years past and even today. A black man in Wisconsin took three forms of ID to the polls in Wisconsin last week and still couldn’t vote. (https://m.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/4engrl/a_black_man_brought_3_forms_of_id_to_the_polls_in/)

It feels like the system is rigged …but it is the system, put in place long before Donald Trump was even thought about. We learned it in civics class in high school, or at least I did. I wonder if Donald missed those lessons.

Sorry, Donald. It’s not about you.

A candid observation…

Being Religious Doesn’t Justify Bigotry

How in the world did religion become the operative excuse to justify bigotry?

In amazement I have watched and listened to reports of state legislatures passing bills that use religion as the seedbed from which the determination to refuse civil rights to the LGBTQ community.

Shaken and angered by the United States Supreme Court’s upholding of the right of same-sex couples to marry, and now being made to deal with the reality that transgendered individuals are a part of society, state lawmakers have gone over the edge.

All this change has been too much for them to bear. They yearn for the way America “used” to be, where LGBTQ people stayed “in the closet” and would not dare even suggest that a law be passed to make their marrying legal. And …they yearn for an America where “girls were girls and men were men.” Archie Bunker, Norman Lear’s choirboy for “the good old days” when white supremacy reigned unfettered, put his yearning into song with his wife Edith every time “All in the Family” came on. (http://artists.letssingit.com/archie-and-edith-bunker-lyrics-those-were-the-days-48fhzf1) Lear’s ability to portray bigotry in a comedic role was brilliant, but the reality of bigotry in real life caused no such laughter.

Bigotry seems to be antithetical to the beliefs of all religions; a study of Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist and other religious dogma reveals texts that admonish the faithful to treat each other with respect and dignity. So it is puzzling that religion is so often, and has so often, been used to justify bigotry of any kind – racism, sexism and homophobia for starters.

Historically, the Christian faith in America was used and quoted as the basis and justification of racial segregation and hatred . Though racial discrimination based on the Bible was most obvious in the South, white churches in the North were not much better. Douglas Hudgins was a well-respected theologian who lived in Mississippi. White believers in the South in general had convinced themselves, based on selective reading of the Bible, that God deigned that the White church remain just that – the White church. They believed that changes in race relations that permitted integration was a defilement and violation of “all that was sacred and pure.” (Charles Marsh: God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights, p. 83) Hudgins preached the rightness of keeping white folks’ religion pure and said that civil rights, or the reach for civil rights by black people, was a “defilement of social purity and irrelevant to the proclamation of Jesus Christ as God.” (God’s Long Summer, p. 89, emphasis mine) ) Hudgins said in that same sermon that the cross of Christ had nothing to do with social movements or realities beyond the church;’ he believed that the Cross should inspire “decent white people toward the preservation of the purity of the social body.”

Even as the Civil Rights movement continued to move forward, fighting religious bigotry as hard as it fought political inequality, religion continued to rear its ugly head against “the least of these.” When Ryan White, the Indiana teen who contracted HIV/AIDS from having received contaminated blood used to treat his hemophilia, he was shunned by …his church. Church members, some of them, refused to shake his hand. (http://www.hemaware.org/story/remembering-ryan-white) No doubt, some of them refused to shake his hand because so little was known about the disease that people were genuinely afraid of contracting it, but some religious people shunned people with AIDS because they believed it to be the “homo” disease, meaning they understood that only gay men got the disease and gay men, the would tell you, were an abomination to God.

The dis-ease with different sexualities has persisted to the present day, with acceptance of it culminating for some in the ultimate affront against God: same-sex marriage. A wide swath of religious people are infuriated that the United States government has endorsed what they think is a sin. They repeat over and over their belief that “the Bible says” that marriage is between a man and a woman. Conversations about transgender individuals are almost non-existent, the thought is so heinous to many “people of faith.”

And so, as in the case of fighting racial discrimination, the Bible is being used again as the weapon to discriminate against the LGBTQ-Transgender community, and state legislators, individuals who take an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States as well as the constitutions of their states, are passing laws saying their rights as religious people are being threatened by the rights afforded to the LGBTQ and transgender communities – and they’re not having it. God is on their side, they believe. God would ordain and sanction their discrimination against these people. No “agape” love is to be afforded these people. They are an abomination and an affront to God and they, good, religious people, are going to make sure their religions remain “pure.”

Laws impinging on the rights of LGBTQ people, and transgender people,(http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/06/us/nationwide-bill-religious-freedom-sexual-orientation/index.html) have little to do with God and everything to do with a segment of the population wanting religion to remain “pure.”

The idea of purity has been a central point of much fundamentalist Christianity, again most notably in the South but everywhere. In 1964, as state lawmakers fought the federal government’s intrusion into their “southern way of life,” those who yearned for the unfettered days of white supremacy and its attendant white privilege were no doubt aware of the poem, “Ode to Sovereignty:”

“O Sons of Mississippi, Remember your mothers; Remember your fathers and grandfathers and great aunts. Remember and salute. How, in this wilderness, they sowed And we reap what they have sowed. It is all for us, the Sovereign state, Of flowing rivers and happy Delta land; O Sovereign state, pure and white, O Sovereign state, where might makes right. O Mississippi, our words are trite But Thou art precious in his sight. O Sovereign state, Dear Homeland, Stand ye firm in these crisis days. Let not Truth confuse thee; God is on our side.”

The poem clearly indicates the belief that God is on the side of bigotry, that God loves the State of Mississippi more than God loves the people whom God created. There are a lot of problems with this theology, but one of the biggest is that the theology being touted as the justification of bigotry is not the theology, the will of God, as found in sacred scriptures. What is being attributed to God is actually the mindset of people; ideology is being presented as and justified as being …the will of God. Such a theology, were it true, would cast doubt on the sovereignty of God, questioning the “state of mind” of God when God created so many different kinds of people. Presumably, since there are in fact, LGBTQ people all over the world, and since there are transgender people all over the world, and people who are asexual and bisexual …there’s a problem if one believes in the ultimate sovereignty of God, which presumes a belief, or the belief, that God created all things and all people.

Bigots who base their bigotry on their religious beliefs therefore reveal a serious doubt about the very sovereignty of God they claim to love. If God creates all things and all people, then God created people of different sexual persuasions. To reject human and civil rights to any of God’s creations seems to be an abomination in and of itself, based on religious dogma and doctrine that teaches us that God says to love and accept all people.

This line of thinking would come off as poppycock to any of those now fighting for “religious liberty.” Their quest has little to do with God and religious doctrine, but everything to do with personal bias and the inability and unwillingness to love and accept all people. God notwithstanding.

A candid observation…