FALL SEMESTER 2009

"Ben"
Intaglio

Over the summer, my hometown suffered our first loss of a soldier in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and it was an especially heartbreaking blow since Ben was only 21 years old. The initial report of his injury was shocking, but everyone believed he would recover soon (being that he was shot in the leg). But he had lost a lot of blood and went into cardiac arrest, and had been unresponsive since being shot. It wasn't until he was moved to a hospital in Washington DC that it was discovered he was completely brain dead, and his mother made the difficult choice to take him off life support and donate his organs.

I really sympathized with his mother, and often thought about how tough it must have been to lose her only child, and to be the one to make that decision. In my History of Motherhood in the United States course this semester, we learned about the true origins of Mothers day, and it's roots in maternal activism. In 1870, Julia Ward Howe called for women to rise up and oppose war in all forms. She wanted women to come together across national lines, to recognize that what women had in common-- the devastation of losing their sons as casualties of war-- were more powerful than petty politics that divided them. She issued a declaration, called the Mothers Day Peace Proclamation , hoping to gather together women in a congress of action, and stop the killing of their sons. According to Julia Ward Howe it was up to the mothers of the world to call a truce and not allow their sons to kill one another.

The quote to the left of the headstone is from the Mother Day Peace Proclamation. The opinion that Julia Ward Howe held about peace being up to the mothers of the sons who were being killed was something that inspired the print along with feeling the personal loss of a friend due to the horrors of war.

"Injustice"
Intaglio

I found it a little tough at first to get an idea going in conjunction with the theme of justice/injustice. I first decided to turn to text (quotations by others about justice) and found a really striking quote by Elie Weisel (which is in the print above). Elie Weisel was a holocaust survivor and author of the book "Night" which re-called the horrors he experienced in multiple concentration camps. It's a powerful quote because it calls for action in the face of our injustices.