Love everywhere yet hard to find
Karlyle Stephens
Mesa Legend
We’re living in times that are unlike any ever before. Where are we headed? That’s a question I’m not prepared and maybe even too scared to answer. But I wonder what will be said about this moment in time when we’re looked back upon as history. If our distant descendants end up as captivated by images as we are, they might get the notion that we were some of the most loving people ever to live. “Love was everywhere and in everything,” they’ll say about us. “Nearly all of their products from cars, clothes, laundry detergent to food were sold on the value of love.” What’s more than this, is how sure they will be that there was nothing people loved more than other people.
If preserved, our descendants will find countless images of us smiling together in all kinds of advertisements, television commercials, and selfies. “Wow, what such lovely people they were,” they’ll think. Will what they see tell the whole truth about the way things were at this time? Has all this “love” brought us closer to the real thing, or moved us farther apart from it? Love today is commodified and is used to sell us things by corporations who engage in this sick kind of pseudo-spiritual marketing. Slogans like “I’m lovin’ it” are overstated regularly and have more to do with loving chicken nuggets than anything else.
Love has been made into a complete gimmick, and consequently now has a cheap effect between people. Love can be measured, and used as currency made up by the amount followers and “likes” one is capable of collecting. In this type of social climate, people also become commodities and objects to be bought and disposed of once no longer useful. It’s why I believe relationships- whether romantic or otherwise- hardly seem to ever reach their full potential. It’s like we’ve made it okay for love to not be about how much of it you can give to the world, but about how much of the world you can get to give it to you. All of this stuff- sex, Valentine’s Day, and the “heart” shapes that appears and quickly disappear when someone double taps our “selfie”-is not love and has nothing to do with unselfish love or happiness. Let’s not trick our future descendants or ourselves by getting confused into believing otherwise.
