Love is god

On this, the eve of St. Valentine's Day, I want to talk about love.  Not Hallmark Card, sappy movie, romantic-dinner-out, flowers and chocolates love, but Real Love: basic human, for all people equally, unconditional, life-giving, nurturing, whole-making, restorative Love.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a little piece and did a show about the military,  about what seems an innate human warlike component to our natures,  and on the toll that takes on each of us, realize it or not, and on the nature of life in general.  I got a few responses that were really interesting and thought-provoking.  Surprisingly, or maybe not, they were mostly from men, who were wrestling with the whole male, testosterone-inflected and -infected, brute-force-is-the-answer reflexive response to so many situations.  This was weighed against the question of whether there are just wars, situations which have gotten to a point at which there is really no other answer, no way to deal with the brutality of one side, except for the use of force by another.  The big touchstone in recent(ish) history is, of course, WWII;  given the madness and carnage being wreaked on the Jews, Gypsies, and really the whole of the rest of Europe by Hitler, what else could we do but respond with force?

History, even more recent history (Pol Pot, Gaddaffi or however the hell we're spelling his name today, Milosevich, Idi Amin, the Afrikaaner regime in South Africa, Lester Maddux and George Corley Wallace in the American south of the 60s Saddam, right up to Bashar al-Assad in Syria right now) is rife with examples of brutal despots who will stop at nothing to maintain or extend their power and influence.  The US has hardly been blameless in such endeavors, from our treatment of Native Americans to African Americans to gays to--well, you get the idea--and we also frequently back the bad guys overseas because it furthers our short-term economic interests, and we seem incapable of thinking beyond the short term.  Gore Vidal once said that we have no public memory before last Tuesday, and I think we have no public vision beyond next Monday.

One common feature of all the evil leaders I've listed above is gender:  all are obviously men.  A couple of you suggested that perhaps it was time to let women step up to leadership roles even more than they have done in recent years, and I've often thought that myself.  It seemed to me that women, who carried and bore and raised us would be less likely then to send us off to die for lack of a better way to resolve conflicts.  But I'm not sure that Maggie Thatcher, or Golda Meir, or Angela Merkel, or Michele Bachman, or Phyllis Schlafley ("Nuclear weapons are a wonderful gift from a wise and loving God"), or, especially,  one of the sickest and most evil people walking the planet today, Ann Coulter, would really be any kind of a step forward, or up.  Scientists worry about the effects of all of the increased incidence of estrogen in the environment, but somehow testosterone levels seem to be rising in women....

If it's not as clear-cut and simple as a gender issue, that women are inherently more likely than men to be nurturing and to seek alternatives to violence as a means of conflict resolution, then what?  Here is where I enter dangerous territory for me, because what I'm going to say seems contradictory to things I've said and acted for much of my life, and because, because of the previous clause, I don't really know much about the religious or spiritual aspects of the stuff I'm going to espouse (when has that ever stopped me?):  but the answer really has to be Love.

As in so many areas, I have lagged behind my wise and wonderful wife in understanding human needs and the essences of life.  When our kids were little and I was learning the enormous responsibilities and efforts required to make these beings who were here through my own actions into good and caring people, as they would behave in ways that, let's say, needed adjustment, I would instinctively go to punitive mode.  Alice's direction, though, was toward making sure that they were getting enough love, that they knew that they were loved, unconditionally.  When we'd see or read about or watch on TV examples of nominal adults evincing evil behavior or just being assholes to someone, Alice would say that person "didn't get enough love."

That thinking made me cringe at least a little.  I saw it as weak, as forgiving, reinforcing, and maybe even enabling behaviors that needed changing.  Maybe it's a result of my own diminished testosterone as I age (have you seen the back of my head?  I haven't, but apparently there's not much hair left there.  Do you know that--well, let's just leave it at hair loss, shan't we?), but I have really come to see that, while it may not be true that "All You Need is Love," the need for love and acceptance (which are really the same thing)  is paramount:  it has the single biggest impact on all of our other needs and desires and ways we interact with the world.

In contemporary America, at least, I think the concept of unconditional love has become twisted, bastardized, turned on its head.  Where the hell did all of the "helicopter parents" my generation has engendered come from?  Why have we become so desperate to be friends with our kids at the expense of being their parents and guides?  Partly because we don't want to be adults ourselves, I think.  But doing for,  unwillingness to confront, to help change, does nothing positive.  Nobody wants to be a jerk; they behave counter to their best selves because of a perceived lack on their part of something crucial to their lives, to their selfness.  I would certainly argue that that lack, if they could articulate it, is sufficient love.  We ALL need to be able to say to those people "I see that you're hurting.  What is it that you're missing, what is it that you need?"  The answer, I'm convinced, is gonna be "love."

Yes, this is easily dismissed as rose-glassed, starry-eyed, Hippie-peace-and-love claptrap.  It doesn't take into account chemical dysfunctions and mental illness, but if the rest of us are set up differently, even those pathological/physiological issues can be surrounded and dealt with in other than violent ways.  People who assault, who rob, who kill, who perpetrate heinous behaviors on the rest of us, might have led entirely different lives if they'd been loved enough.  Thinkers down through the ages have promulgated these ideas, from the Greeks to Jesus (setting aside the whole "Son o' God {TM}" discussion, spreading the gospel of love is a pretty powerful and cool idea), Gandhi, Mother Theresa, Dr. King, to, bringing it all back home to music and pop culture now, John Lennon.

Now, John Lennon was a controversial figure, and really not a nice person in many, many ways, especially as a younger man.  He was violent, he treated women badly, he was caustic and cutting in his wit and his lyrics.  He was also abandoned by his parents at an early age, raised by his auntie, who did her best but couldn't fill the void in his soul, that lack of love at crucial ages and stages.  Say what you will about Yoko, but his relationship with her effected a huge change in his outlook and behaviors.  He was killed before he could complete the journey, killed by someone who didn't get enough of the same things that Lennon himself had lacked.  As Mind Games says "Love is the answer and you know that for sure/Love is the flower, you got to let it, you got to let it grow."

Say to a pure Marxist that Communism has been shown to be a total failure, and that person will reply, "How do you know?  Pure Communism has never been tried."  Say the same to a Capitalist about Capitalism and you'll get the same response: "In its pure form, it's never been tried."  I'm pretty sure we can say the same about pure, pervasive, unconditional Love.   How do we finally start it?  Dunno. But what have we got to lose?

Hope you can join me for lots of "Love" songs (but not really of the "moon, June, spoon" sort) on Tuesday, VD, from noon til two on 100.1 FM or wool.fm.  I also hope some of you will be moved to jump in here with some comments to further a discussion....

What's So Funny About Peace, Love and Understanding?