FLYING BERNIE SANDERS AND THE BREASTFEEDING FREEDOM FIGHTERS

It's not your typical Vermont headline:

"Mad Moms Stage Nurse-In"

When I saw that this had happened in the Green Mountain State, my next-door neighbor, I envisioned a horde of maniacal country matriarchs running amok, attempting to heal people against their will, and I wondered why Vermont had to enlist their help for such a mission when it already had Bernie Sanders.

Closer examination, however, revealed that the "mad moms" were a group of nursing (breastfeeding) mothers staging a protest at the Burlington airport by sitting in front of a ticket sales counter with their babies.

They were angered over the recent removal of a nursing mother passenger from a Freedom Airlines Burlington-to-New York flight because the woman had been breastfeeding on board and would not, when pressed to do so by a flight attendant, "discreetly" cover her baby's head with a blanket. When she refused, she was "booted off the plane."

I'm trusting that this was not done in-flight.

This is a humor column, after all, so I'll leave the legal unravelings of this up in the air, where they're sure to be soon embraced by an airbus full of lawyers. Suffice to say that Vermont's Public Accommodation Act allows breastfeeding in public, contains no "discretion" qualifiers, and covering your baby's head with a blanket now carries the Michael Jackson stigma with it.

Between him and sister Janet's Superbowl much agog about nothing eye-popper, the Jacksons have set babies and breasts back a thousand years.

To this day, I don't know if I was a breastfed baby, or if Mother Pauline blanketed my head in public, and though she would tell me today if I asked, I'm not going to. I've always felt an unusually high level of comfort and tranquility, however, when camping out and eating in a rain-soaked tent, so I have my suspicions. There's enough Freudian fodder there to sink a herd of Oedipusses, so I'll let you wade through that on your own.

But, I'll bet the reason why too many principals of this world still get apoplectic whenever a woman's upper embonpoints are publicly liberated, can be traced back -- as such forbiddings always are – to Jacksonian suppressions and exploitations of the things, or as the fictional Briton Lt. Col. J. Algernon Hawthorne once spoke to his Colonial counterpart: "This infantile preoccupation you have with bosoms. If American women stopped wearing brassieres, your whole national economy would collapse!"

My daughter, when visiting recently with my new grandson, did breastfeed the little feller as we all sat in the living room, and she did cover his head with a blanket, as was her patriarchal deference, though it would not have mattered to me either way.

Just knowing that my grandson will grow up to love camping, eating out, and the sound of rain on tent flaps is enough.

It did remind me, however, of when she was being nursed by her mother long ago, and how those maternal feeds had always sparked a feeling of jealousy in me, when I couldn't provide the male equivalent of intimacy & nourishment.

Now, before a mob of male lactation proponents writes in, (yes, evidence of nursing dads has been documented) let's be clear that I'm not suggesting we relegate breastfeeding to fathers, even if we could. Physiologically, the mechanisms may be there, if only latently, but I'd hate to see this androgyny craze blur our bio-foundations as well.

I'm always one to celebrate our differences along with our commonalities, and the day men & women share EVERY form & function equally, I'll invite all my male friends to join me in a nude, flatus-igniting beefsteak sit-in at the Moosewood Café.

I do confess, however, to once having put my infant daughter to my breast, (she needn't know about this, thank you) after one particularly hard-pressed day of feeling like a domestic fifth-wheel entity, and she indeed did immediately shift into suckling gear.

The well was dry, of course, and it wasn't long before she fidgeted herself into a good wail, and if it's possible for a six-month old daughter to throw a "Gee, Dad, that was dumb!" glare at her well-intentioned begetter, she leveled it perfectly.

I abandoned the practice, and confined myself to those time-tested patriarchal duties & devotions: offering my shoulder as a post-nursing, burping bulls-eye, tickling her silly, making mudpies, and later forgiving her without malice for her mischievous little-girlhood when she shaved the dog bald.

So, join me in a hearty hiss directed at Freedom Airlines, who belie their own moniker and well-deserve my Boob Of The Week Award.

Got milk? Want Freedom to fly?

Bring your blanket, baby.

Copyright 2006 B. Elwin Sherman. All rights reserved.