As we approach a potentially historically disastrous turning point for the USA, I’ve wondered, ‘Where are the adults in the room?’ The Fifty-Eight people: POTUS, VPOTUS, Attorney General (AG), Fifty Senators, and Five Supreme Court Justices, can and have demonstrated glaring failures in the entire system. The will of the people, both on the streets and by a majority count, is not being executed. However, Fifty-Eight people cannot do it alone. There is a minority of people supporting them, individual judges, and police forces to a relatively narrow and shrinking demographic of people being fed fear and lies by a media operation who profits from the anger. Where are the adults in the room who remind people that love is the answer?
Love is the answer, full stop. We can grab religious texts from Asia, the Middle East, Europe, et al., and what are they going to say? Love is the answer. People are dying in the streets right now here at home and across the globe trying to stop various forms of authoritarians, be they political, religious, or social, from radicalizing more people to continue the cycles of hate and pain. The fight isn’t always in grand scale gestures like standing in front of a wall of police forces with firearms pointed at you. Sometimes the struggle is smaller, every day, nuanced battles like when a woman gets interrupted by a man trying to explain how another woman was interrupted by a different man. Those jaw-clenching moments routinely happen because women aren’t valued as equals in society. Love is the answer.
Here in America, somewhere along the way, we were ingrained with this false notion that we can out-work our problems. We can run away from everything by working harder. The depression-era phrase ‘pick oneself up by the bootstraps,’ which is supposed to demonstrate a physical impossibility, got co-opted into some rallying cry for self-determination. Similarly, Trickle-Down Economics was a rebranding from Horse-and-Sparrow Economics. The idea has always been you keep feeding the horse more, and maybe you, as the sparrow, are fortunate enough to eat from the horse’s droppings. What if the horse gets bigger and eats more but leaves fewer droppings? It’s been a failed economic practice for generations. It has resulted in catastrophic greed, untold environmental damage, and incalculable human suffering. Hard work and greed at the expense of relationships is the plot of many famous stories. Again, love is the answer.
A little over Two Thousand years ago, one of many religious rebellions happened in human history. The consequences of it are still felt every second of every day. In the west, the calendar is modeled around it. For many people, there’s a disconnect with our relatives who existed in what that calendar would call negative numbers. How does one have a ‘negative’ history? We don’t inherit the planet; we borrow it from our children. Our ancestors, a long time ago, who were caretakers of the Earth for us, led a comparatively simple ‘hunter-gatherer’ lifestyle. We have insufficient knowledge of who they were as writing hadn’t formally been invented yet, but we’re still here, so they persevered. However, about Twelve Thousand years ago, it all changed.
Around Twelve Thousand years ago, we became much more proficient in agriculture. We didn’t just invent it overnight, but we got good enough at it wherein people started to give up their more nomadic lifestyle for a communal one. We can speculate why, but in my heart – love is the answer. We are people called people living on a planet called dirt. For generations, various roaming groups of people would come together to dance by the fire and exchange what they had, knowledge or objects, etc. Now, Twelve Thousand years ago, people were creating a place of permanence to gather. People could exchange ideas, items, seeds, and more, in a home for everyone. It was a source of food security and more. We are inherently social creatures; we want to love and be loved.
The Age of Agriculture set forth an explosion of human population that set modern history into motion. We baked bread, brewed beer, invented writing, created civilization et al. People for Twelve Thousand years, when not oppressed by religions, racism, sexism, etc., have been pursuing their passions. For Twelve Thousand years, people have been (re)discovering love is the answer. Whether it be in the tranquility of a tea ceremony, or the infinity of the stars, we find love is the answer.
Twelve Thousand years removed by the people who created a permanent fire for people to dance around and sing the songs of their people, we still sing and dance by the fire. We still point to the clouds and stars to create shapes and tell stories. We still celebrate the seasons and have cultural rites of passages. Twelve Thousand years branched out the family tree from those early agricultural pioneers, thinkers, engineers, bakers, etc., we still find joy in doing all the same things. The challenges of today, in some ways, resemble the challenges of their day just on a different scale. They were trying to create a place to call home, which was more on a village level. We’re trying to make a place to call home, which is now on a global level. The motive is still the same; love is the answer.
It is disheartening to see the pain in the world right now. Volumes of history books can (hopefully will) be written about the suffering in the world. There’s no way I could do justice to the systemic issues people are fighting against: systemic poverty, systemic racism, sexism and glass ceilings, religious oppression, anti-intellectualism, the resurgence of fascism, wealth inequality, climate change, and regrettably more. There is a common thread linking them all, however, and that is an absence of love. Whether it was taught by their parents, their church, or some other source, children are not born hateful. Children are indoctrinated into hate and pain and then have to unlearn them as they get older, to discover love is the answer themselves.
The scars of abuse are visible across gender lines, economic lines, and generational lines. It’s not necessarily intentional; some people don’t know what love is, and perhaps never have. Others once knew but forgot or buried it underneath anguish. We, individually, cannot tackle the world. I have tried for far too long. However, big things are made of little things. Individually, we can break the bonds of hatred. We can learn to love ourselves and those around us. We can learn to love those who do not look like us, and those we’ll never meet. We can learn to love those from whom we borrow the planet. We can learn to love those who also look up at the clouds and stars, who also dance by fire and sing songs. We can learn to love those who celebrate the seasons and chase their dreams. It’s not too late to be the adult in the room and say ‘Enough!’ Whether it be with a clenched jaw, a tear-streaked cheek, an extended hand, or a smile, we can be the ones to teach those who need the lesson or reminder, love is the answer.