9/1/2024

Dear Friend & POTUS, JRB,

            It is with a heavy heart that I write today upon hearing the news of the murders of 6 hostages in Gaza, including Hersh Goldberg-Polin (HGP). I ache for his courageous parents who have been telling everyone who will listen about the plight of their son & have insisted that “hope is mandatory.” After their efforts, this loss must be devastating.

            I was particularly moved by HGP’s mom’s speech to the UN last Dec which included her poem lamenting the suffering of all mothers who cry when their children are harmed. The line “All those tears, a sea of tears, they all taste the same,” struck me as particularly poignant.

            As HGP’s dad said at the DNC “There is a surplus of agony on all sides of the tragic conflict in the Middle East in a competition of pain. There are no winners.”

            The same is true in Burma, where some mothers follow their children to the frontlines to care for them.

            I am reminded of Julia Ward Howe’s 1870 proclamation where she wrote:

            Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your 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.”

            I feel for the mothers of the victims of war as well as the mothers of the murderers.

            WINTA

            BYBS,