By Elizabeth Lee Vliet, MD
The mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers that Americans remember each May are strikingly different from “Julia,” the star of Obama’s political campaign.
We cannot see helpless Julia as Molly Pitcher, stepping up to fire a cannon in the Revolutionary War in place of her fallen husband. We can’t picture Julia taking risks to free slaves in the War Between the States, or doing demanding work nursing dying soldiers in battles, or being willing to endure walking alongside a wagon train to settle the West.
Julia does not work from dawn to dusk to build shelter, plant crops, harvest food to eat, sew clothes, haul water, or clean up waste as our ancestors did. Julia does not stand side by side with her parents, brothers, sisters, and husband to build a community and fight to defend it.
Julia does not seem to have any of those natural relationships most women have—she only has the parasitic “relationship” with the “government” with her from cradle to grave.
Julia doesn’t need the skills our foremothers had…or even the skills of women today who work in fields previously only available to men. Everything is done for Julia through government benefits! But remember, those benefits come from taxing someone else’s work.
Poor hapless Julia can’t even “focus” on her web design work without free contraceptives provided by the government to “ease her worries” about getting pregnant. When Julia does “decide” to have a child, she then sends the child off on a bus to be raised at a government school.
Our foremothers showed strength, independence, and courage. They had no guarantee of the basics of life, even water, food, or shelter, and endured unbelievable hardship. They persevered through hard times, held their families together, and passed along their culture, their traditions, their standards, and dreams of liberty to the next generation.
American women have helped build the strongest and most prosperous nation in the history of the world. Through their own hard work, women reached the pinnacle of success in many fields: business, medicine, law, the military, engineering, space exploration, mining, construction, science, and government. They achieve through their effort and initiative and development of skills, a process we call earned success.
Julia, on the other hand, exemplifies learned helplessness and dependency. Her life shows the stark contrast between the vision of our Founders and the vision of modern “progressives.” Instead of having the freedom to choose her own path and to succeed based on one’s work, one’s intellect, one’s right to keep property, and one’s personal values, Julia’s life is subservient to Big Daddy government for protection to help her day to day. Although Julia doesn’t realize it, she could lose her favored “protection” at any time her protectors lose an election.
Government will take care of Julia—after it decides she is one of the chosen. Julia will be allowed to live as long as she is perceived to be an asset to the state. Once she becomes too old, or too sick, she will be “comforted” and “assisted” in dying when the government decides it is her time to go so that “society’s” resources can be spent on someone younger or more politically valuable.
It is a cruel irony that the very progressives who are reducing our women to this pathetic state are accusing others of making “war on women.” This government nanny kills the soul and the creative spirit of strong women, and creates passive, helpless shells of women living a shadow life.
The spirit of America is not embodied in the faceless, passive cartoon character of Julia, holding out her hand for government benefits.
The true spirit of America is embodied in The Lady Liberty, a strong woman who values the law, stands proudly holding her torch high as a beacon to victims of tyranny and oppression throughout the world.
The spirit of women we celebrate each Mother’s Day is embodied in the millions of women who dared to dream, who dared to take risks, who dared to explore the unknown and work alongside men to build a great nation.
I have spent a career in Medicine focused on empowering women, not creating dependency. Let it not be said that freedom to choose one’s path in life died on our watch while we made passive, parasitic “Julias” out of our young women.