Love And Politics

Love has, for the most part, been excommunicated from political discourse. And yet love– and the peace, safety, belonging, and cooperation it makes possible– is not a political priority today or even a consideration. In our personal lives we crave love. I have not met one person whose deepest wounds did not come from an injury to love. We spend years in painful relationships, struggle with addiction, loneliness, depression, and endless forms of failure-to-thrive, all because love was missing or lost. And we go to great lengths to regain it.

Love is not a weakness as abusive adults and abusive governments would have us believe. Love is actually the healthiest food for human beings. So why is it that love and politics have been divorced? Perhaps it is because peaceniks won’t mobilize the troops; women won’t push the button. Yes, love and connection would make it nearly impossible to wage war. If love and politics were reunited, our whole social, political and economic structures would require massive renovation.

In the meantime, can we understand that people deprived of love are not flawed by nature, lazy, inferior, or born evil? Let’s not justify condemning them because we, as a society, are failing to feed them healthy food. Let’s look fearlessly at where love and belonging, safety and cooperation, are missing, and commit to this new political agenda.

Here and abroad.

What would a reunion of love and politics give us? Love cements the bonds of connection with one another; connection is the surest road to cooperation, cooperation is the only road to lasting peace, and without peace we have little and perhaps no hope of escaping our own extinction. 

Love is the most powerful antidote to WMD. And I will tell you from years of experience as a mother, wife, friend, therapist and ordinary human being, fighting is easy. Reacting out of anger, hurt and fear is automatic and unconscious for too many of us, and the cost is now inordinate human suffering and mass death, nationally and globally.

You likely know that the rewards of love in your own life far outweigh all the hard work needed to sustain and renew it. I hope you do, because love is calling to us; it is the next step in human evolution.