Blessed Are The Caretakers

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

With Mother’s Day at our threshold, I’ve scanned my notes on the week’s activity, the various politicians mucking up the works with their disparate versions of reality, and find myself echoing the line that Maggie — the little girl character that played Peter Pan’s daughter in Robin Williams’s film, Hook — threw back at her captor as she was being rescued: “You need a mother very, very badly!”

It comes as no shock that Earth Day, April 22, comes just as the Sun enters Taurus, warmed by the love of the Goddess, its signature rooted deeply in the soil and the pregnant promise of spring. Mother’s Day follows on its heels with that same kind of solid, ever-patient, nurturing energy. Gaia is the intelligence-entity of this planetary body, and we are hers much as each of us is a product of our earthly incarnational-mother this time around. Edgar Cayce said mother/child was THE bonding relationship of our lifetime — for good or ill, present or not present — and no doubt the most complex.

But, that said, the act of mothering is not necessarily about gender. It’s about care-giving, sometimes called care-taking or, even more simply, caring. Taking care of, in the best way possible. Taking care, in dealing with all the mental, emotional (and, quite often) environmental details. Giving care as in providing something essential to the good of the ones receiving. That’s not gender specific activity, nor does it necessarily refer to children. Some of the best mothers I know aren’t women, and some of the most impressive nurturers never conceived a child. As Robert Heinlein put it, “Being a mother is an attitude, not a biological relation.”

Supposing that’s true, many of the political leaders of the world appear to be foundlings. Netanyahu evidently needs a mother pretty badly, someone to grab his ear and twist it hard. He finally formed a coalition government, squeaking in just under the wire that would have forced him from office. Shortly before a midnight deadline, he partnered with the nationalist Jewish Home party, hard-liners that oppose peace with Palestinians and intend to increase West Bank settlement construction.

The possibility of peace talks resuming anytime soon — or warming American relations, for that matter — seem dim. To some, that secures the traditional patriarchy of the Israeli stronghold in the Mideast. To others, who understand what a flawed and basically weak coalition this is, that means Bibi will go down in history as desperate and belligerent, while infighting makes his nation’s politics even more chaotic.

Bibi represents the tough-love, take-no-prisoners Daddy State, similar to what our conservatives represent: think George W’s “You’re either with us or against us” mentality. As counterweight, liberalism is referred to as the Mommy State — sometimes the Nanny State — which supposedly coddles its ne’er-do-wells, and is associated with Socialism. Libertards, as the rabble-right likes to call lefties, are credited with embracing the Marxist approach, which gives “to each, according to their need,” ostensibly from the community pot. This is known, with a sneer of contempt, as “redistribution.” Because Americans have gotten lazy, and depend on brief explanations and sound bites, this constitutes a flawed and narrow definition, without much substance.

Let’s try another set of sound bites. Socialism, in this country, is defined as a half-step away from Communism, the dreaded “better dead than Red” of the 1950s, marketed with a shadow of fangs and claws from historical figures like Mao and Stalin and Fidel, all authoritarian dictators. Naturally, the conservatives in charge of pushing this disinformation move the needle into the extreme zone, scaring the children. But socialism and communism are essentially only economic systems in opposition to capitalism (and enough said, from the conservative point of view — the sheer horror of it all!).

We need to acknowledge that socialism is part and parcel of the American system, reflecting FDR’s vision for a restoration of constitutional promise with his New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society push to end poverty and racism. I dislike the term “level playing field,” a catch-phrase used too often these days, but it describes FDR’s desire to restore liberty to the individual, stolen by commerce and denied by elitist corruption and influence. Socialism seeks a middle-ground, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his contribution.” It promotes personal freedoms, religion included, while depending upon public ownership and cooperatives over privatization and plutocracy — and restoring that balance is the challenge of the hour.

While we can’t convince Elizabeth Warren to throw herself against our current cultural barbed-wire, we do have someone with an impressive voice seeking a change in the national conversation, and therefore, national consciousness. Senator Bernie Sanders, newly announced presidential candidate from the left, promoted his Democratic Socialist bona fides on Sunday pundit television last weekend by defending the highly effective Scandinavian democracy model. George Stephanopoulos grinned and said, “I can hear the Republican attack ad right now. He wants America to look more like Scandinavia,” to which Bernie responded, “That’s right, what’s wrong with that?”

Not afraid to speak up, this week Bernie wrote an op-ed urging the government to break up big banks, using his growing public megaphone to inform citizens that the banks that were ‘too big to fail’ when the economy crashed in late 2007 are now 80 percent larger than they were then. 80 PERCENT! Bernie says if they’re too big to fail, then they’re too big to exist.

If Teddy Roosevelt were alive today, do you know what he would say? He would say break ‘em up. And he would be right. And that’s exactly what I plan to do.

A bill that I’ve written would require financial regulators within one year to identify and break-up huge financial institutions like JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley so that they can never again cause another financial crisis like the one that happened in 2008.

Never fear, citizen. This isn’t fantasy, this is populism with a bullet. Once you get past the smokescreen of the culture war topics (racism, sexism, abortion) and the PowerPoint presentations of the lobbying class (factory farms, big pharma, corporate welfare), Sanders speaks to the concerns of the average American — right AND left — who hasn’t seen a raise in income since the 1970s. Perhaps it’s possible to make it clear to a corporately-dominated nation that reasonable checks and balances on the capitalism model create a stable economy for the socialist strategy required to rebuild the failing middle class.

As examples, look at what Utah, with religious roots in communalism, has done with its homeless population. Look at the successful placement of homeless vets in New Orleans. Is there any doubt that these people would be considered disposable, even criminalized, under a purely oligarchic system? That without the compassionate — and eminently practical — intervention of the determined and visionary, they would wither and die?

And although Hillary (former FLOTUS and national Mommy, Nancy Reagan notwithstanding) is beginning to “fashion a progressive agenda,” as lefty New York major de Blasio announced this week, Bernie’s got her beat on most counts. Not that he has either the backing or the visibility to win this race, I’d assume, especially not with Hil projecting a couple of billion to keep the race going. But he DOES have the agenda to shift the conversation soundly to the left, especially since six presidential debates were scheduled this week by the Dems. Perhaps destined to never reside in the Oval, Sanders — seems to me — is the most powerful voice in this race to date.

This is Goddess energy we’re talking about. Can you hear it when it’s spoken? Can you feel it when it vibrates? We discuss the polarity issues between political philosophies endlessly, but it is the compassion issue that resonates with those on the left, and a growing number on the right, who have an awakened awareness of not just commonality with others but a sense of duty, even privilege, to nurture the larger community and not leave anyone behind.

That may be called Nanny, called give-away, called liberalism, but essentially, much like core Christianity, it’s actually a kind of conservatism, turned on its head by those who have captured “the flag,” and constantly challenged. Taking responsibility to protect what we have with sound stewardship, making way for what’s new by improving the traditional values of common good and shared liberty, kindness and empathy VOID of financial gain? What’s wrong with that, Bernie Sanders would ask? So would I.

Caring about one another is what we learn, if we’re lucky, at our mother’s knee, or, if we learned the opposite, it’s something we must take responsibility for nurturing within ourselves, refusing to pass along learned dysfunction, mindlessly. Taking care of someone or something that needs our attention is not a burden but an opportunity to get out of ourselves, widen our vision and enlarge our heart. Caring for one another is precisely why we came.

So it’s soon Mother’s Day, a day of recollection for some of us, remembrance and appreciation for all of us — and a time to look around to see what Goddess has in mind for us, as we try to come to balance. Our poster child for Goddess energy this week is our neighbor to the North, Alberta Canada.

Heartiest congratulations to Alberta for breaking a 44-year hold of conservative leadership to elect the New Democratic Party. The win, considered a long shot, was met with cyber-celebration including several pictures of pigs flying and a couple of succinct tweets, such as “Imagine if a political party made up of Chris Hayes, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren swept into power in Texas and Mississippi,” and another that said, “The last time I was this excited to see an empire fall there were Ewoks dancing!”

What prompts this glee? Alberta is known as the Texas of Canada, exploited by the Big Oil concerns long-favored among the Tories, a prime hub for exporting tar sands. Some 78 percent of Canada’s oil comes out of Alberta, much of it tar sands, and the province’s newly elected premier from the liberal New Democratic Party (NDP), Rachel Notley, is a foe of the XL Pipeline. On Tuesday, voters approved forcing the gas and oil industries to pay their fair share of taxes and royalties, phasing out coal and cutting back pipeline projects. And — sea change on the Hill — Notley has pledged to cut all money used to lobby Congress for the pipeline. Happy Mother’s Day, Gaia!

This is a major blow to the oil industry, even if there is question about the ability of this newly elected party to effect change. Nonetheless, this changing of the guard must bring attention to the situation and quite possibly reverse the blanket acceptance of tar sands — its extraction always considered a problematic operation — as a viable resource. Could little Alberta be the place where things begin to shift? Could the New Democratic Party be the David to Big Oil’s Goliath? Thank you, Alberta, for hitting the target.

What we nurture, what we care for, must be reflected in our value system. It’s incumbent upon us, in this time of social and political upheaval, to review what we DO find valuable, what we DO want to conserve and tend for future generations. Like it or not, we are responsible for the future. While others appear to have all the power, we play a vital part in the creation of tomorrow.

All of us have mothers, some of us are mothers and, without exception, we are all capable of mothering some creative project into existence. As we nurture and create, we mother. We tend and care for, simultaneously, our personal dreams and responsibilities; the outgrown agenda of our inner child, that occasionally peeks out from behind the shadows, asking for attention and healing; the shape of our tomorrows, and those of our world. For all that, Mother’s Day is a day for reflection on what we value and how.

And while we will, hopefully, find just the right thing to do for our own mother or her memory, let’s also note that the original Mother’s Day had its roots in a day of remembrance for the 650,000 souls lost in the Civil War, with mothers of the North and South coming together over the unspeakable loss of so many beloved sons. The original Mother’s Day was, essentially, a protest against the uselessness of war, the childishness of pride and ambition, and the tragedy of unnecessary death. We can honor our mother no more powerfully today than to continue that enlightened work, seeking an end to the mentality of warfare. In this, as in everything, may love lead the way.