MOTHER BASHING

As Mother’s Day gets closer, we see countless ads urging us to honor our moms on their “special day”. But beneath the officially encouraged reverential attitude toward those who gave us life, is a deep layer of contempt. The syrupy verse on the Hallmark card presents a romanticized vision of maternity which disguises the disrespect – even hostility – for mom, the person, hostility that exists in both men and women.

Child-bearing and child care continue to be the occupation our society expects women to choose. This is a choice most women do make. Maybe it’s time to ask ourselves why.

The creation of a new human being is a complex process. Pregnancy and childbirth are physically arduous, emotionally intense, and exhausting. We are culturally conditioned to speak only of the joy of having a baby and to celebrate each birth. What is not acceptable is any discussion of labor pain, which is almost always severe, or the “skid marks” childbirth leaves on our bodies. And we are in deep denial of the fact that women still die having babies.

Once a child is born, its mother begins the challenging, difficult work of meeting its every need. Few first-time parents avoid being overwhelmed by the number of tasks required to care for a baby. Few are prepared for the degree of sleep deprivation involved. Both parents are affected by the arrival of a newborn, but it is the mother who is usually the primary care giver.

As the baby becomes a toddler, mother must be constantly vigilant to keep the child safe – without discouraging his or her natural need to explore and learn. She is the child’s first teacher. It is mostly her responsibility to socialize, train, and ease him into the ways of the world. The school years bring a new set of maternal responsibilities, the child-centered volunteer chores moms perform – PTA, Little League, field trips, baking cookies for school events.

We couldn’t love our children more. But make no mistake. Mothering is hard work. It is a 24/7 responsibility – every hour of the day, every day of the week. It is also unpaid, undervalued, unrespected. The woman who stays at home to care for her kids is seen as “not working”even though she is responsible for all domestic chores, errands and almost 100 percent of the parenting. Anyone who says she “doesn’t work”should try spending a week running a household in which there is a toddler and a new baby.

Then once her children are grown, she will discover that the long range effect of her time-out-for-mothering years will be a reduction in her lifetime earnings, lower social security benefits and thus the increased likelihood of old-age poverty.

 

The woman who combines child-rearing and work outside her home has a different set of problems. She’ll learn that reliable child care is scarce and expensive. She will live with ongoing pressure to be a good employee, maintain the family home, get dinner on the table every night, keep everyone in clean clothes and still find the time and energy to provide the care and guidance needed by her children. She will be tired all the time and live with the constant stress of having to “do it all”.

When we consider the physical price women pay giving birth, contemplate the thankless hard work of child-rearing, count the considerable economic costs in terms of lower pay as a result of choosing motherhood, we are left wondering why it is that women continue to bear children. And why it is that our society looks at mothers and mothering with scorn, even resentment. For men and women alike are quick to blame their mothers for everything that went wrong in their lives. One would think gratitude a more appropriate response.

We live in a relentlessly pro birth society. The media, the politicians, the religious leaders all give lip service to “family values” and blather on about the miracle of life and the glory of motherhood. But they balk at supporting adequate funding of good education and adequate health care for kids, or the kinds of social supports provided in other industrialized nations.

Our culture displays a “penalized-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don’t” attitude toward motherhood. Before any woman makes the decision to give the country a child, a new contributing citizen, maybe she should demand something in return – something of value. Respect, appreciation and the end of mother-bashing would be a start, but only a start. Economic justice, in the form of government assured health care for kids, free high-quality education for all children in a modern school and a crime-free neighborhood, an affordable, healthy food supply for families with youngsters, and social security credits for child-rearing, should be the norm.

 

 

 

 

 

Filed under Uncategorized | Comment (0)

Our National Credit Card

by Beth Grimes

We Americans carry a lot of credit card debt. Of course, we’re required to pay it back or at least keep the finance charges paid.The nation’s credit card is also over-loaded and our nation, too, must pay finance charges. Our  national debt is in the neighborhood of nine trillion bucks. That’s trillion with a “t,” folks. A billion is a “one” followed by nine zeroes, a thousand millions. A trillion is a one followed by twelve zeroes. Most of us have trouble wrapping our minds around a billion, let alone a trillion.

Will that ever be paid off? We’ll see. We’ve faced a worse debt problem.  Presidents Truman Kennedy, Johnson and Carter eliminated most of the WWII debt. Republicans Eisenhower and Nixon did their part, but their Republican administrations were dominated less by right wing ideology than is the present one.So how did our leaders get us in hock up to our ear lobes? It was easy. The government just spent more money every year than the revenue it received, creating annual deficits. Our debt is the total of those deficits.

Conservatives, the very people who preached to us about the evil of government over-spending, are the folks who plunged this country into the deepest fiscal holes. From 1981 to 1988, the Reagan administration tripled the national debt from the low $900 billions to $2.7 trillion. The elder George Bush piled it up to $4.5 trillion. Bill Clinton slowed the growth of the debt and left us a surplus of $127 billion when he left office in 2001. But his successor, George Bush the younger, has run it up to nine trillion. And counting. It’ll probably reach ten trillion by January 20, 2009, when he hands it off to the next president. Makes a person dizzy just thinking about it.

So we, our nation, all of us, owe a gargantuan sum of money. The government copes with deficits and ever-ballooning debt by borrowing money. It does this by issuing U.S. securities: treasury bonds, notes and bills. Promises to pay. Don’t you wish you could do that? Of course, the government must pay interest on those securities or no one would buy them. The money to pay that interest has to come from – who else? Us. American taxpayers.

For many years, United States investors bought most of these securities. After a time, American individuals and institutions could no longer buy enough to finance all the borrowing, and we started selling them to foreign countries. Japan, China and Saudi Arabia, for example. That makes us vulnerable, because the value of our dollar has been supported by foreign purchases of our treasuries.

In a good year, fiscally speaking, our leaders could stop spending like drunken sailors and balance income with outgo, thereby diminishing the money we have to pay for interest on the debt, by just not increasing it. Don’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen.

The United States has a big, complicated economy, so it’s no surprise that it has a big, complicated federal budget. Think of the federal budget as composed of trust funds, i.e. the Highway Trust Fund, Social Security, Medicare, etc. plus the General Fund. Taxes of different kinds supply money for all of the above. According to the White House Budget Office, in 2006 the Federal government collected $2.3 trillion tax dollars. Forty-four % in individual income taxes, 37% social security and retirement taxes, 12% corporate income taxes on profits, 3% excise/sales and use tax, and 4% other sources.

Actually the 12% paid by corporations comes from the consumers of the corporations’ products, because the tax is packed into the price of their goods as a cost of doing business. The part of the budget not obligated to be spent for a specified purpose is called the General Fund. It is the money pot from which Congress and the White House spend your income taxes and those of profit making enterprises. Its budget is called “Discretionary,” meaning that Congress and the Administration get to decide how to spread it around.

Since we taxpayers are footing the bill for borrowing costs on all this spending, let’s see who’s getting the money. The Discretionary Fund Spending Request for FY 2007 is $871 billion. Of that amount, approximately half is for defense. That proportion rises to more than half if we add Veterans Administration outlays to those of the Defense Budget. And we should. What’s worse, the staggering dollar cost of Defense Department operations in the spending bill does not include most Iraq and Afghanistan military costs.

We do not need to keep fighting a so-called war on terror. As the American public is beginning to realize, the Iraq war is mainly for control of a diminishing resource, oil. Such control will help huge energy giants maintain or increase their profit margins. It is a war to justify throwing money at corporations that make hardware for battle. It is a war to provide funds for the worthless Homeland Security Department. It is all of those and much more. We are a nation drowning in debt on which we pay the finance charges. Having been given lavish tax cuts, the wealthiest Americans have been spared the pain of paying most of those charges.

The source of money  thrown down the rat holes of war and preferential treatment for some is you and me, babe. So we should take it personally.

What else could we have bought for all that spending? Start with infrastructure. We live in a country where bridges fall down and levees break. Repairing those would save lives and create jobs.

We live in a country that does not provide health care for everyone as does every other industrialized nation in the world. Our life expectancy is lower than that in 41 other nations. Our infant mortality rate is higher than most of the developed world – just above Latvia which is at the bottom. Health insurance in the USA covers a smaller percentage of our population than in  other rich countries. You think maybe that’s why we lose more of our babies and live shorter lives?

Our nation also compares unfavorably with other industrialized countries in spending on  transportation and education and 37 million Americans live in poverty, an increase of 1.1 million just last year.  

Some claim that George Bush and his whole administration are incompetent. Don’t believe it. Bush, aided and abetted by his own agencies and sycophants in Congress, is simply following the playbook for his own social and economic class – and doing a damn good job of it for them.

To the detriment of the rest of us.

Filed under Uncategorized | Comment (0)