A baby is born. A child is stricken with a serious illness. A spouse has a stroke. A parent falls ill. These are the kind of events that throw a working mother’s delicate balance between her job and her family into chaos. Poor and minority women have long worked in the paid labor force. During the last four decades, middle class women have joined them, but American society has done precious little to restructure the workplace or family life. The result? Working moms get treated to brunch or dinner on Mother’s Day, but are burdened and exhausted the rest of the year.

Just in time for Mother’s Day, Joan Blades, co-founder of the online activist organization MoveOn.org, has launched a grassroots campaign dedicated to making mothers’ private choices and dilemmas a central part of our national public conversation and political agenda (www.momsrising.com).

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I keep waiting for the liberal hawks who supported a war against the tyranny of Saddam Hussein to speak out against the genocide in Darfur. But the silence, as they say, is deafening. Where are the liberal hawks, such as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who were (and still are), caught up in their hallucinatory fantasy that George W. Bush would fight their war, for their reasons? I don’t need to publicly humiliate these people; they know who they are. These are the folks who still think the war could have been won, if only the Bush administration had planned and executed it their way.

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