Putting Our Collective Foot Down..

When I attended a lecture by His Holiness The Dalai Lama in May, he emphasized the role of mothers in creating a better world. He said that mothers had a special responsibility to make their children feel loved. Boys, in particular, need this. As a mother of two boys, now men, I’ve thought about that counsel almost daily since then. Both of my guys turned out to be intelligent, responsible men. So I think I did an okay job. I respected and welcomed their opinions. I let them know their feelings mattered…that they mattered. Kids need to be treated with dignity and respect so that they in turn do that for others. They were my focus and it was my responsibility to make sure they understood how to navigate through life in a respectful and honest manner. This isn’t to say that I was one of those mothers who related to my kids as a friend. I saw that happen in some families and it was a recipe for disaster. How do children learn to respect authority if their parents won’t assume that role?

But none of this matters if some crazy person with a gun can come out and kill my boys whenever he feels like they’re up to no good. Apparently our kids aren’t safe anywhere – not in school, not at the mall, not walking home from the store. And yet, some of us go insane at the notion of not having access to military style assault weapons and extended clips. Why on earth would we set ourselves up for such disaster? Why on earth would we create laws that seem to go a little too far into personal choice when defining our right to defend ourselves from harm? Using a weapon to stop an attack is acceptable. Chasing someone down who did nothing to you and using the weapon when the person decides to defend himself against your actions defies all sensibility in the first place. To think a guy like that was found not guilty of such an act should scare the hell out of all of us.

There’s a meanness out there now. Everything seems like an assault on one group or another. SCOTUS gave personhood to corporations, so the rest of us are inconsequential. They gutted the Voting Rights Act, just in case we didn’t understand what they did to all of us with Citizen’s United. How many ways can the highest court in the land tell the citizens of this country that they don’t matter? Texas just made it more difficult for women to seek health care, particularly in the case of abortion, with another new bill introduced which prevents abortion after 6 weeks. For the love of God, we don’t always know we’re pregnant at 6 weeks. Why come after women this way? When we respond, and we will, you won’t like it. I promise. 

Women want peace. We want calm. We want to go about our lives feeling safe and want everyone we love to feel the same way. We don’t want to be disrespected – not by our partners, children, employers, friends, communities, governors, Congress.. We’re tired of seeing news reports of our children being riddled with bullets at school. We’re tired of our hearts breaking and knowing that doesn’t matter so much anymore. 

Sybrina Fulton didn’t want to be a role model for every mother out there who has lost a child to violence. She’s far more noble than I would have been if one of my sons had been murdered. Particularly if the murderer got away with it as in the case of her son, Trayvon. 

My mother used to “put her foot down” about one thing or another, and I knew at that point that whatever I wanted was about to fly right out the window. That woman was so effective that although I entered college at 16, I continued to ask permission to do things until long after I moved out at 18. Maybe that’s what all of us need to do. Maybe we need to put our “collective foot” down and say we’ve had enough. We’ve had enough of laws that protect the bad guys. Doesn’t matter if it’s a gangster or a bankster, we’ve had enough of other people destroying lives with impunity.

Who doesn’t agree with that? Because the outrage is growing.