It had been a nasty week with the shooting down of the Malaysian airline over Ukraine and the children gunned down on the Gaza strip.  My sister, Jenny, and I were discussing these events as well as the PTSD of our cousin’s son.  “When he was a little boy, he would carefully remove caterpillars from the streets so that cars wouldn’t squash them,” his mom had told us.

We talked about the patriotism often at the root of military action and how the  “love of country” gets tangled with other loving instincts to produce the horrors of war.

Jenny said, “When patriotism overrides what is in the mother’s heart, then the whole world is in trouble.”

May mothers everywhere, continue to raise loving children and may “matriotism” begin to be given equal time.