I presume you get the “joke.” Felicity Huffman is one of two celebrity mothers charged with bribing college officials to get their daughters into select colleges.
Oh, and hey, that college admissions scam is about to get its own TV show! Yep! Oh, fun! Just turn everything that happens to celebrities into entertainment bonanzas!
Plus, gee, Felicity, what an over-the-top mother you are! Forget modeling for your child what real ethical behavior is. Instead, show her how to make it happen, whatever you want, by whatever means. And money will buy anything, anything! Get your kid into a “good” school. That will help her, and it will also make you look good. Yeah, in this celebrity-driven culture, lookin’ good is what counts.
So while I can appreciate the sentiment expressed in this 2007 flick, I note as well the ironic twisting in the wind that occurs now, only 12 years later, when we find ourselves wrapping our minds around a constant barrage of fake news, disinfo, misinfo, and who knows which is which? Plus, the ongoing, devastating exposure of corruption, at every level of society, belching up from the deeps, getting “spun” this way and that, confusing right and wrong, good with bad, critical with trivial, to the point where, at this point in his-story, things just ain’t, ever, what they seem.
Frankly, I much prefer the original proclamation to all the righteous glossy female lips in the film above. And yet, remember, just because someone’s a woman, and a mother, doesn’t make her a good model for either her own child or for the rest of us. War-mongering is not gender-specific; both war-mongering and peace-making start within, inside each of our hearts, male or female.
MOTHER’S DAY PROCLAMATION
Boston, 1870
“Arise, then… women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts,
whether our baptism be that of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies.
Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage,
for caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country
to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.
From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own.
It says: Disarm, Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.
Blood does not wipe out dishonor,
nor violence vindicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil
at the summons of war,
let women now leave all that may be left of home
for a great and earnest day of council.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them then solemnly take council with each other as to the means
whereby the great human family can live in peace,
each bearing after his own kind the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
but of God.
In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask
that a general congress of women, without limit of nationality,
may be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient,
and at the earliest period consistent with its objects,
to promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
the amicable settlement of international questions,
the great and general interests of peace.“
~ Julia Ward Howe
