Guest Column

Mother’s Day started over 150 years ago when Anna Jarvis, an Appalachian mother, organized a “Mother’s Service Day” to raise awareness of children suffering from poor health conditions. It became a yearly event advocating for the health of children.

Fifteen years later, Julia Ward Howe, a pacifist and suffragist, organized a “Mother’s Rally Day” encouraging mothers to rally for peace. She believed mothers bore the loss of their children’s lives to violence more harshly than anyone else.

Mother’s Day has its roots in advocating for the health of our children calling for peace and an end to violence. It seems appropriate we honor Mother’s Day addressing the scourge of gun violence traumatizing our children.

Gun violence is now the leading cause of death of children in America. Let that sink in.

The common greeting of the Masai tribe in Africa is “Casserian Engeri” which can be translated, “And how are the children?” Before talking about the weather, health, or any other topic, they first ask about the welfare of the children. They understand that a society is only as well as their children.

How can our children possibly be okay when they go to school feeling unsafe in their classroom; when they practice active shooting drills hiding under desks; when they are taught techniques to stop the bleeding when their classmates are shot?

I can’t get out of my mind that mothers of children murdered in Uvalde, Texas, had to be swabbed for their DNA because their children were unrecognizable because of the military, assault-style weapon used to murder them — a weapon made for soldiers in war to kill as many people as possible; a weapon that has no business being on our streets or in the hands of civilians.

James Madison, a father of the Constitution, said, “Liberty may be endangered by the abuse of power, but also by the abuse of liberty.” And that’s exactly what’s happening. One person’s unregulated right to own however many and whatever guns they want is considered a higher value than the common good and the safety of our children.

We don’t need statistics to know our children are not well. Our children are traumatized. And, we as a society will never be well until our children are well.

What might change if we greeted one another, and before we talked about health, weather, or politics, we asked one another, “How are the children?” What might change if every decision that was made by our elected leaders was made through the lens, “Will this decision protect and heal our traumatized children? Will this decision move us closer to a life free from violence and fear for our children and ourselves?”

We’re tired of thoughts and prayers and say prayers are inadequate. I disagree. We need prayer now more than ever. But, we need to be praying for ourselves. We don’t need more information. Information will not change us or the world. Information is not the same as transformation. We need to become substantively different people if we’re going to build a world where our children are free from violence and fear. We make a mockery of prayer if we continue to ask God to solve a problem we are not willing to solve ourselves. We need to imagine a world where our children aren’t scared to go to school and summon the courage to make that dream a reality.

We may hold very different views on guns. Hopefully, we can be united in a common desire for our children to have a chance to grow up and flourish. Our children are not well. We are not well. Our society is not well.

What better way to celebrate Mother’s Day than to ask ourselves, “What is the work of love that is mine to do building a world where our children are free from violence and fear?”