• Do it for the children.

• Do it for the children. We like to talk about how much we sacrifice for kids. But we're helping ourselves, too. Many millions of moms and teachers are valued chiefly by virtue of their relationship to children, a status we guard jealously. "Although our participants obviously want and welcome help from men, they define themselves before all else as the ‘children’s mother,’ a title they aren’t thinking about giving up. Because power and titles go hand in hand, responsibility for child rearing provides a certain amount of clout and deference within families . . . as well as the satisfaction that motherhood brings" (Henry 141). Some women even see their mom status as a platform from which to attack other women: “homemakers have become far harsher toward working women for not putting their children first” (145).

I wish I could remember the exact words to a poem a colleague once wrote. It was about the political work we were doing. Someone asked him, he wrote, How can you take these kinds of risks? You have children --doesn't that make you afraid for them? His answer is that he does this work precisely because he has kids, because he wants to make a better world for them.

At the time that struck me as the perfect explanation; less so now, because I've heard all sorts of causes justified as being for the sake of children.

As you might could tell, I have no kids. But it makes me nervous when folks on the left and right so readily justify their actions in the name of their children. Anyone can claim anything, but that don't make it so.

Just as with the "God told me to do it" argument, "Do it for the children" can justify all sorts of policies, some not so very nice. After all, some parents in effect teach their children to shun their sibs for unapproved sex practices, or vote for politicians who send their children to die for the politicians’ private gain. Having kids can make parents more afraid to challenge injustice, as my colleague's poem acknowledges. There's also the backwards investment effect: for every Cindy Sheehan who questions why her son died in Iraq, there are scores who, even if they didn't love Halliburton before, can only say of their dead children that they died in the cause of freedom-- and let’s prove it by killing more young people.

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“Many a time, I would see the president [G.W. Bush] walk into a room or area where the family of a fallen soldier was gathered. He would hug the mom or wife. He would visit with them and the dads and children, listening to them share stories of their loved one. Often a mom would look the president in the eye and say, ‘You finish the job. You make sure my son did not die in vain’” (McLellan 2008 p. 209).
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At the same time, the focus on children can obscure what needs to be done. For instance, some development agencies have to market their excellent community development work as charity for children, as if it’s OK to let adults eat grass or tree bark, or pick the undigested grains from the dung of their landlord’s draft animals.

Having kids around is good for everyone-- even for someone like me, who has to make do with students and nieces and nephews. It seems to me that it would be more truthful to talk about policies that affect our kids as being in our own self-interest, rather than something that we do for someone else.

Si Kahn's "Gone, Gonna Rise Again" is about a grandfather.

These apple trees on the mountain side
Gone, gonna rise again.
He planted the seeds just before he died
Gone, gonna rise again.
I guess he knew he'd never see
the red fruit hanging from the tree.
But he plowed the seeds for his children and me--
Gone, gonna rise again.

When her father died, a friend referred to this song in his memory. The tune still brings tears to my eyes. What our ancestors did brings us life and joy and meaning.

But this guy was a farmer. What was he going to do? Stop farming because he had a birthday? Stop practicing what it took him a lifetime to learn? Stop using his hands and his brain to bring beauty and sustenance to the world? He works for himself now as much as for a future he cannot share.

Then we have the folks who prefer to sow death for generations or millenia. I think of refineries spewing toxics into rivers, timber and cattle companies tearing down ancient forests, Israeli bulldozers uprooting centuries-old olive orchards, the gangsters of many Traditions, as we like to exalt them, teaching children to kill . . . .

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"We men of the new Germany have to be very tough with ourselves even when we are forced by circumstances to be separated from our families for quite a long time. This is the case right now. We have to settle up with the war criminals once and for all so that we can build a more beautiful and eternal Germany for our children and our children's children. We're certainly not being idle here: three or four Actions a week. First gypsies then Jews, partisans and other such riff-raff. . . ." --Fritz Jacob, police chief (Klee 158).
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• Sacrificing the labor force. It's no coincidence that the “helping professions" --child care, health care, education, prostitution-- are staffed largely by low-paid women. The corps haven't yet mechanized diaper changing or wheeling old folks into the bathroom, so this kind of works takes lots of hands. And despite the billions spent to prove otherwise, there's no research yet showing computers can raise kids better than caring adults. But if we can't yet eliminate the labor force entirely from these sectors, at least we can minimize their pay. (Or, at any rate, the total cost of labor. Some nurses are paid well but work in appallingly understaffed situations. They are supposed to tolerate the very high stress for the sake of putting their patients’ interests above their own-- when in fact both patients and staffs would be better served by a more honest attention to self-interest.) It’s no coincidence that, as opportunities for wage labor increased during the rise of factories in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there was also a big push to define respectable women's work as strictly housework, done strictly for love.

‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, of the baker that we expect our dinner,’ [Adam Smith] wrote, ‘but from regard to their self-interest.'
Just a minute. It is not usually the butcher, the brewer, or the baker who fixes dinner, but his wife or mother. Does she act out of self-interest too? Smith would have been horrified by the very idea. Self-interest was appropriate only to the impersonal world of the market. The moral sentiments, he believed, were firmly rooted in the family and the home (Folbre 9).

In exchange, instead of money, moms got a certain prestige and a bigger say-so in menu planning, appliance purchasing, and which church to go to. The servants might get a bed in the attic and Wednesday nights off. Millions of women working outside the home were and are paid even less than the mostly poorly paid male labor force, because, under the "family values" regime, they're not really supposed to be there.

Folbre argues that the need for cheap caring labor is also at the heart of today's religious backlash. Citing Barber's Jihad vs. McWorld, she writes,

“The worldwide resurgence of religious fundamentalism testifies to anxiety about the destabilization of the traditional patriarchal relationships that have ensured a relatively cheap supply of caregivers. . . . A consistent demand of religious fundamentalism is the reestablishment of rules that would restrict women’s rights to avoid caregiving. The policies implemented by the Taliban in Afghanistan are the most extreme” (204)

She concludes that we've got to resist both the control of the fundamentalists and the destructive competition of global corporations.

Still, if we want to fend off the religious fundamentalism symbolized by the jihad, we need to resist McWorld. Globalization is forcing us to rethink both the family and the state. . . . It is easy to see why the extreme alternatives of jihad and McWorld loom large. One represents a totalitarian response, the other a perfectly competitive one. Both responses require far less energy and negotiation than would a democratic attempt to collectively define and enforce responsibilities for care (205-6).


If cheap women's labor is one pillar of the empire, surely the military labor force is the other. If soldiers and their families could eat flattering bumper stickers, they'd be living high off the hog.

True, for a lot of young people, war is the best option available. It's not like anyone is twisting their arms. Here in the U.S.A. we don't recruit 10-year-olds by handing them a machete and telling them to kill their moms or be killed themselves, as is the practice in less enlightened lands. Nor do we send thousand-dollar checks to the impoverished families of suicide bombers, as some Mideast leaders are reputed to do; going to Iraq is nothing like suicide. Here young folks can choose whether to enlist or not. Just as not all small town residents have to work in fast food places, and not all immigrant women have to clean toilets for a living, so not all teens too poor for college have to end up in the Army. They can look at what their choices are, and sign up for Iraq or not. Entirely up to them.

Once in the service, soldiers have choices, too. They can put themselves in harm's way or they can run away. The risks run by some fighters at some times are pretty incredible. For instance, in World War II, the chances for Allied airmen of surviving their full tours of duty were very low-- 25% after 25 missions. In other words, three-quarters of crewmen would die in the first 25 missions, and they must have known it. Yet there were relatively few deserters. I can barely imagine the grim prospects facing some Vietnamese kid in the 1960s crouching under a tattered palm as the napalm and 5-ton bombs rained down. The stats aren't so good for suicide bombers either. So how do the generals keep finding bodies to fling into the meatgrinder?

I've mentioned already the well-studied phenomena of bonding with the platoon mates for mutual protection. Also very well studied, but not much discussed in polite company, is the fine web of institutional mechanisms to keep our boys and girls steely under fire, from punishment details to dishonorable discharges to firing squads. Humiliation is the most reliable tool, not so revealing as executions, and there's always prison to back it up.

Effective humiliation requires above all that soldiers and their communities buy into the value of war. So any empire worth its war contractors plans ahead, recruiting moms and dads maybe even more diligently than the soldiers themselves (have you seen the recruiting ads that address parents directly?). The best war training starts from early childhood, in which violence is associated with hard work, responsibility, courage, obedience and sexual attractiveness. Of course a young soldier doesn't want to disappoint the folks back home, even if she has to die to make them proud. In the war biz, the stick is never very far from the carrot.

Thus, while there might be compelling psychological reasons for a U.S. soldier in Iraq to tell a TV reporter, "If I didn't believe in what we're doing I wouldn't be here," what he said was not strictly true. There were only two ways for him to go home, and neither had anything to do with his opinion of the war.

In terms of their political role, too, soldiers have few options. On the one hand, we require of our soldiers that they follow legal orders at the risk of their lives. On the other, we might wish that fewer soldiers start off so thrilled to fight Halliburton’s wars of conquest; that they didn’t provide votes and propaganda for the war contractor parties. But soldiers are no more authoritarian than very large segments of the civilian population. Not having experienced as many palace coups as some other countries, we may forget sometimes how valuable it is for soldiers to follow the direction of civilian leaders. When those leaders turn out to be lying murderers, that's our fault, the voters' fault.


Meanwhile, the “free market” sector has certainly done its part on the home front:

A large body of evidence has surfaced about the pervasive role of coercion in the New Economy frauds. Ironically, those in the corporate and professional ranks who yearned to be free from state controls found that when it retreated they were left more vulnerable to coercion by superiors, major clients, and others who brokered access. The threat of state sanctions had actually protected those who wanted to resist demands that they engage in illegal or unethical acts.
As it turns out, there were many more instances of people questioning or resisting dubious practices than was previously thought. The reason why most drew little notice is because they lacked 'champions' or alternative story lines to link up with-- and the fact that they were usually repressed or otherwise bullied, threatened with marginalization, ostracism, or expulsion."
Importantly, intimidation was used not just to punish those who refused to go along, but also to establish the fact that one was dependent on certain figures . . . . Many central figures in the New Economy scandals sculpted their immediate surrounding to their liking, dangling a carrot from one hand while waving a stick (or club) in the other (Tillman 227-8).

Halliburton's whole operation depends on the professional willingness to sacrifice by millions of workers in exhausting or dangerous jobs.