Marianne Williamson on Running for President in 2024 and the Importance of Motherhood in America

Marianne Williamson

Williamson founded Project Angel Food, a non-profit organization that has delivered more than 14 million meals to ill and dying homebound patients since 1989. The group was created to help people suffering from the ravages of HIV/AIDS.

She has also worked throughout her career on poverty, anti-hunger and racial reconciliation issues. In 2004, she co-founded The Peace Alliance and supports the creation of a U.S. Department of Peace. Williamson ran for the Democratic nomination for president in 2020.

Marianne Williamson knows firsthand how our current system is failing millions of Americans. She’s had a forty-year career facilitating personal and systems transformation, and has inspired millions of us to overcome in spite of the system.

For a long time, it has been reinforced to many of us that being a mother caring for her children and taking care of her home is a woman’s most important role. At present, women have been empowering themselves while still being able to provide care.

In today’s episode with Marianne, we’ll talk about the importance of women – particularly, being a mother – in the current times where public policies are almost proactively neglectful of our children.

America’s children are the biggest collateral damage.

Marianne envisions a beautiful future for the youth. She has been a big believer that having strong support from the government is key to setting that progressive future.

There are many factors badly affecting the nation's children that are overwhelming the system. In fact, there has been a causation between the negative effects of social media on children. It mostly affects the mental health of children and causes depression and sleep difficulties. It also disrupts a child’s focus and so, these kids have a hard time studying and performing well in school.

Marianne sees American children in crisis to a great extent. You cannot entirely protect your child from poisons in the air and other negative factors that are becoming more and more threatening. This plays a big part in Marianne’s motivation and inspiration for her candidacy and her child-centric campaign.

She points out that there’s some sort of double allegiance in several different agencies. While they promote the health and safety of American citizens, they bow down to the short-term profit maximization of big companies and corporations that negatively affect the environment and the society.

Because children are not in the legal age to vote, they’re the biggest collateral damage according to Marianne. They don’t have any leverage despite being citizens. Their alienable rights to life and liberty, and even pursuit of happiness are often shunted aside. And if women, especially mothers, do not speak for their children, then who is going to do so?

It’s not just about our children, it’s also about our grandchildren.

What people should know is that the challenges we are facing now and the consequences of every decision the government makes is not just temporary. It’s going to transcend through generations. This is not just about our children but also our grandchildren.

Of course, having a child isn’t at all easy and the cost of child care is high, which is why younger people nowadays are no longer considering having children of their own given the state of our environment and economy.

Marianne emphasized that as mothers, we also have to think about others like how a mother would think about her own child. Moreover, we have to evolve this idea and share our love to other people and their children.

For her, it's our moral responsibility to care about others and to care about the children of mothers in the world who have no way of defending themselves and their children. We have to have that sense of community among us.

Principles of peacebuilding

With the aim to provide the youth with a better future, we need to establish peacebuilding. Similar to integrative medicine, you don’t just wait until you get sick. Rather, you proactively cultivate health because sickness is the absence of health and not the other way around.

Conflict is the absence of peace which is why we must proactively cultivate peace. To have a higher incidence of peace and lower incidence of conflict, the following factors must be present: expanded economic opportunities for women; expanded educational opportunities for children; reduction of violence against women; and the amelioration and diminishment of unnecessary human despair.

We are the most medicated society in the world and in some ways the least healthy.

The number of people struggling with their health, particularly their mental health, has been increasing and the primary solution people consider or come up with is medication which shouldn’t be the case. It seems like big pharmaceutical companies have put a spell on us forcing us to believe that what our child needs is medication.

Marianne claims that we are the most medicated society and the least healthy in some ways among the advanced societies. We also have the worst infant mortality among developed countries which should prompt people to question it.

We need a mother in the White House who says that policy will not work, it will hurt children.

It comes naturally to parents to do whatever they could to protect their children. That is why we get these fears concerning them especially during their teenage years. Marianne argues that we must have the same attitude towards our country.

We didn't get the right to vote just to sit around. We got the right to vote so that we could try to change things. But too often we do not use the power and the society that we have. This is what makes Marianne stand out – she’s encouraging, remarkable, and courageous. She stands up not just for herself but also for her people and empowers them to stand strong.

Marianne has always said that the White House needs a mother who can say that policy will not work and it will hurt children. We need someone in the office who is going to be transparent and accountable. To reiterate, we have the right to vote and we should exercise this right to change things.

There’s no magic wand to heal society.

There’s no magic wand that’s going to correct public policies and heal society. Some of the changes have got to be personal whereas some of them are cultural and some on the level of public policy. It's not gonna be an “either-or”; it has to be both. Marianne clarified that making some changes in a public policy is necessary for personal changes to take effect.

Many years ago, when a child was experiencing a problem, you had to go to the therapist or the rehabilitation center to resolve your child’s issues. If you're really going to address what's a problem for the child, you have to address everyone in the family.

The same applies to society. You can't just talk about depressed individuals without talking about what are the factors in the society contributing to that depression, particularly how much of that has to do with the disconnection that so many of us are experiencing.

Everybody is just trying to survive and that means something is very wrong in our society. The sad reality is that people are living paycheck to paycheck affecting the level of economic tension and anxiety on a chronic level.

We have to realize that public policy is responsible for the fact that so much economic resource was squeezed out of the middle class of the United States. This is why economic justice matters because it's far more difficult to be the people that we want to be when we're living constantly in such a state of survival.

Why do women need to be at the forefront of imagining the world that we want.

Being consistent in her pursuit of empowering women, Marianna believes that women need to be at the forefront of imagining the world that we want. Otherwise, we will continue to be just trying to survive in this world that we don't want.

The change will only come if we stand up for a different possibility. The highest level of achievement that a woman can have as a mother is to see her child happy and well-adjusted.

Marianne also reminds people with a struggling child to have more patience as God is not finished with your child yet. Don’t blame yourselves; it’s not your fault. There’s something comforting about lighting a candle for the Divine Mary and asking directly to take care of our children and to help us get through things in life.

We need to change the direction of the country from a kind of soulless transactional perspective to a far more natural, nourishing, and mothering perspective.

The patriarchal mind says the mother is weaker or the feminine is weaker, when in reality, what's weak is the soulless perspective that does not take care of your children. There's nothing strong about allowing your children to be destroyed. Protect the children and make sure that they'll be safe.

What does rewriting the mother code mean to you?

Rewriting the mother code, according to Marianne, means remembering the mother code that's already deep within us.

She reminisced about being a young woman starting her career years before she had children and reminding the mothers in a support group that they already know about motherhood. Nature has imbued all of us but particularly women with this deep intuition or multidimensional knowledge and wisdom.

The code of natural genius within the mother is already there. What we need to do is unlearn the diminishment of that and make a stand for that and other women too because we're not going to get there unless all of us get there.

We have to be inclusive. For that, we need to see other women struggling to get past the patriarchal prejudices in their lives. Do what you can to lend a hand. We need to do this together.

To find out how to be involved as a volunteer and if you resonate with what Marianne has shared so far, you can check out Marianne’s website (https://marianne2024.com/).