Even if you look past the jewelry, perfume, chocolates, flowers, and puff-paint frames, no one argues that celebrating your mother is not important. I love making my mom breakfast in bed and officially commemorating her daily selflessness and fabulousness....but this Mother's Day, I'm looking beyond my mom and my grandmothers. I am thinking about all of the mothers who have a son or daughter fighting in a war-- and Mother's Day as a call for peace. I just recently learned that Julia Ward Howe wrote her Mother's Day Proclamation in 1870, thinking of the carnage of the American Civil War (and the Franco-Prussian War). Howe was calling for disarmament and her Proclamation was tied to her feminist belief that women have a responsibility to shape their societies at the political level. more

It’s been seven months since the Clinton Global Initiative’s 2006 Annual Meeting, but I find myself coming back to President Clinton’s closing session remarks frequently:

Bishop Tutu reminded us that the essential wisdom of Africa about the human condition is captured in the word ubuntu. He didn’t give you the literal translation because it is almost mystical. The literal translation of ubuntu, in English, is “I am because you are.”

He was the first person to introduce me to ubuntu, though the Bantu word has now spread far beyond Southern Africa (i.e. an operating system). It was very humbling to be standing 20 meters from Bill Clinton as he conveyed the importance of our connectivity, expressing an ideology that you belong to a greater whole; your humanity, your being is thought believed to be diminished when others are humiliated, tortured or oppressed. more