COMMENTARY
Deep down and all politics aside, mothers know best what America needs
Dan Rodricks
If you gathered a million American mothers and asked them what the country needed, I bet this would be the consensus: More doctors, nurses and caregivers; better pay for teachers and social workers; affordable health care for everyone, including a holistic system for treating people with mental illness; and big national campaigns to reduce guns and gun violence, promote nutritious food and exercise, fund the best education system in the world, encourage young people to consider public service and shame haters into growing up and being better human beings.
That would be for starters.
On Mother’s Day 2023, we should look around at the many things that make the most prideful Americans despondent and ask: What would mother say?
I know what mine would say. The late Rose Popolo Rodricks would remember growing up during the Great Depression and the New Deal, and starting a family during World War II, and she’d look at America today and say the country needs to stop arguing and take better care of itself, that we’ve let too many problems fester for too long, and ought to be ashamed of it.
Case in point, right here in the blue state of Maryland: We still have people with mental illness, some of them acutely psychotic or suicidal, languishing in jails, waiting for treatment in an appropriate facility. Five years ago, a Baltimore Circuit judge held the state’s health secretary in contempt for failing to place criminal defendants in state psychiatric hospitals. “Fix this problem, and do it now,” Judge Gale Rasin said.
While Maryland and other state governments try to make improvements, it never seems adequate or sustained.
Meanwhile, conservative politicians who refuse to deal with the nation’s gun crisis point to mental illness as the core problem when it comes to violence, and yet they refuse to adequately fund treatment.
Apprised of this, a million mothers would say shame on us. Shame on us for not building more hospitals to replace our prisons. Shame on us for being in denial about too many problems. Shame on us for letting partisan politics or ignorance get in the way of a better country.
How else to explain the right’s opposition to an affordable health care system? How else to explain the reluctance to vaccinate and, more generally, the denigration of our best medical minds?
A majority of my theoretical million mothers would say listen to the doctors, not extremist politicians or talk-show hosts.
They’d say the decision on whether to have an abortion should be left to a woman and her doctor. I am sure most mothers would trust science; they would respect the educated and experienced researchers at the Food and Drug Administration to have made the right call about the abortion drug mifepristone. Most mothers would be highly suspicious of loudmouth pols who claim to know more about what’s good for the public health than men and women with medical degrees.
Dr. Jack Resneck, president of the American Medical Association, warns that disinformation and the encroachment of political ideologies on the delivery of health care have created pressures that doctors never expected to experience, adding to the career burnout many of them already feel. “I’m angry about how science and medicine have been politicized,” Resneck said, “about the flood of disinformation that seeks to discredit data and evidence [and] undermine public health.”
Coming out of the pandemic, an extensive AMA survey found that one in five doctors and two in five nurses planned to leave their careers by some time this year.
A majority of mothers would call that a national crisis and demand that the country immediately go in a new direction.
Of course, that’s easier said than done. Getting Americans who’ve eschewed critical thinking for conspiracy theories is going to be hard.
But mother would say the best of us need to keep to the high road, and you do that by standing up for what’s right — and not just for personal benefit but for the common good: A better educated and skilled workforce; a social safety net that lifts people out of poverty; a fully accessible and adequately staffed health care system; prisons that make rehabilitation a robust priority, a full-throttle race toward the green energy future.
This isn’t socialism. It’s motherism, and the nation needs a big dose of it.
I’ll tell you what else a million American mothers would say.
They’d say, deep down and all political tribalism aside, the country needs some hard introspection. It needs to understand that, as powerful as we remain economically and militarily, we’re underperforming on many levels. That’s why the word “broken” appears so often as a description of things — our politics, the immigration system, student achievement, our care for mentally ill people and the drug-addicted, and our willingness to deal with the gun crisis.
Republicans, Democrats or independents would agree with that assessment. They’d say it’s time to stop all the nonsense and grow up, time to stop electing liars and ignoramuses to public office, tolerating crassness and mediocrity, and abiding the debilitating gun violence that takes place every day. A million moms would say it’s time to get serious about fixing the country.
Several years ago, a Baltimore drug dealer told me he had decided to come off the street and find a regular job. “Time to stop shaming my mother,” he said. That’s what I’m talking about.