love

If I have learned anything at this early stage of the seemingly endless barbarity that is 2020, it is this: regardless of socioeconomic standing, the vast majority of the human race does not know what it is to love or be loved.

Love---real love---doesn’t measure; it only gives. The opposite of love isn’t mere hatred, but it’s even worse than that---it is apathy. Far too many of us for too long become intoxicated with the certain putrefaction which underlies an unthinking, unfeeling, milquetoast, Laodicean every-man-for-himself existence, anywhere in the world. And it is much easier, if not more instantly gratifying, to be apathetic rather than sympathetic.

Through no fault of our own, as I understand it, we hate each other because we don’t know each other. We don’t know each other because we’re socially inept, which in the end isolates us, entirely by design. We need not walk in fear, one of another. To be fearful of the other is to be seduced by maniacal propaganda in a way unlikely ever to be undone. Fear and propaganda often masquerade as practicality and logic, when in fact they are the exact inverse. It is very hard to operate out of love instead, and yet it is just as necessary.

I have the nerve to believe that for all our shortcomings, transgressions, and abject failures, we are destined not to hate or fear or railroad our neighbors, but to care for them; to uplift them; to enlighten them; to grow old with them; to get in good trouble for them, knowing that he who saves one life saves the world entire.

I have the nerve to believe that for humanity to fully embrace the best about itself, we can and we will unlearn the worst.

I have the nerve to believe that love is not just a four-letter word; it is the most polydimensional force there is, and therefore it is humanity’s only hope.