Sharon Doubiago
credit: Andrena Zawinski

Mothering and the Military: How Do We Raise Our Children?

by Sharon Doubiago first published in War Crimes Times, Veterans for Peace, Fall 2013, Vol V. No. 4

I went in search of a book for him. I went through the Children section and Fairy Tales, through Parenting and Mothering, through Psychology, Alternative Education, Women’s Studies and Feminism. Then Philosophy, Mythology, Politics, New Age, and War. Nothing even remotely close to what I was looking for.

I wanted a tale of a boy/man hero against war. A Conscientious Objector. A warrior for peace. A tale of a boy with the morality, integrity, intelligence, courage, physical and psychic/spiritual strength to resist our culture of war. I wanted a children’s tale fitting to the culture of peace, art, love, activism and ecofeminism I’ve rooted my life in, and one a growing boy like my grandson could find meaning and inspiration in, could model himself on.

I understood the feminist protest against macho heroes, but I was knowing, again, as I had with my son, a negative side of this protest. To be an anti-war male is an heroic stance. We need such representations, especially for our children, to counter the military’s glorified image of the war-mongering righteous killer for God and Country, and its stereotype of the unpatriotic, cowardly resister of war.

The manager was summoned. She seemed startled as if the thought had never occurred to her, but she understood what I was looking for, and why.

“Such a book does not exist,” she said.

I remember the sinking feeling for humanity, for all life, for the future, for Gaia. Why is there no such book? Why hasn’t the counterculture or any of those History of Consciousness Ph.d-ers, particularly those who are parents, not written and published such?

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