Mothers Day and a Star of Gold

Today is Mothers Day, a day celebrating motherhood and the sacrifices women who are mothers make every day. Many mothers spent today working, for example. If you took your mother out to dinner there's good chance some of the women you saw in that restaurant were mothers themselves, working hard on Mothers Day to support their families. So being a mother always means sacrifice.

Sadly, though, there's a singular sacrifice so many mothers have been called to make in history, and that is sacrificing a child in war. Even though we are fighting two wars at this very moment, the consciousness of those wars isn't very high in society.

But every lost soldier is some mother's son or daughter and I think it's good this Mothers Day to remember that fact of war. There's a lot of frivolity about decisions of war among our "elite" classes of office holders and pundits, especially among those who never served themselves, for some reason or other.

War is sometimes necessary in an imperfect world, despite its horror. And its easy to get carried away with the drama, the heroism and the glory. Gen. Robert E. Lee, who saw quite a bit of war, remarked that "It is well that war is so terrible - otherwise we would grow too fond of it," after a particularly terrible and heroic battle at Fredericksburg.

We should even remember that each of our slain enemies is a mother's son and no matter how necessary, it is also tragic and delivers an unspeakable anguish into their lives.