As Mother’s Day approaches, we are hearing noises from the left demanding revisions in the meaning of the day.  For them, Mother’s Day is not sufficiently inclusive and will become subject to the same pressures for warping or extinction as has been brought to bear on the Boy Scouts, Columbus Day, and bathrooms.  Britain leads the way in this process with Mother’s Day greeting cards with such sentiments as “Two mums are better than one mum” and “Dad is the best mum ever.”  And for the transgender set, “Happy You Day.”  It seems being a proud traditional mother is no less toxic than being a masculine male or a feminine female

It is a truly strange world the left is building, but it also may not be sustainable.  There are consequences for degrading such institutions as motherhood that would gravely affect the future of the human race. Because children are tomorrow’s parents, mothers must be the best they can be today. 

Because of revolutionary zeal, mom’s functions may be overlooked.  She is, in fact, the source of our rudimentary and fundamental culture, the stuff we barely ever speak of.  The attachment between mother and child is the beginning of learning to be human.  The effects of breastfeeding, eye contact, skin-to-skin contact, smiling, cooing, and enthusiastic play between mother and child starts at the moment of birth.  A mother who is incompetent or angry or depressed or disinterested or under too much emotional pressure begins processes in the infant (extending all the way to genetic changes) that most probably do not serve the child well for its future integration into society. 

The memories of mother last a lifetime, whether those memories are auditory, visual, tactile, or olfactory. In undisturbed mother-child relationships, it is the mother’s behavior that receives the child’s most concentrated attention due to her role as nurturer.  For example, empathy exhibited by one’s mother cannot but be a source of our own empathic behavior, though it is our present understanding that the trait has a strong genetic component as well.

At least partially because of our history of mother-child interaction, scholars and innovators like Elon Musk who are afraid of artificial intelligence programs that may soon reach IQs of 10,000 have good reason for concern.  Perhaps everyone, no matter their political views, should assiduously continue to observe Mother’s Day as a cautionary political act as well as a personal celebratory moment so we may nimbly step off the tracks as our fate barrels towards us.  Our common enemy in the future may well be those entities who never had mothers and so cannot ever share our humanity no matter how good the programmers.  And it may be that only the ingrained memories of our mothers will be able to save us from capitulation to the unrecognizable reality we are ourselves creating.  The human race depends for its existence upon such traits as kindness, empathy, patience, tolerance, and love -- all beginning with mom.  For such traits, computers will always fail the Turing Test and so can never be human.