Love

1843:

Love is one of those words easily be misunderstood and over-used today, too full of sickly-sweet overtones to ever mention the word. But love isn’t quite everything anyway, surely? Life isn’t just a matter of showering love on everything we see. In the material world, we have the formalities to attend to, like clothing, washing, looking after our gadgets and machines, etc.

Love is a big emotion, embracing the mundane too. Take the fridge; it does a lot for us and deserves to be ‘loved’. It keeps our food cool and our beer cold. The fridge and the computer and the car, they each deserve respect. Our high-‘ideal’ lifestyles often show disrespect for things, and if we think of animals as mere ‘things’ then that same attitude of disrespect is applied to other ‘materials’, especially when they’re a source of food.

We’re good at ‘loving’ but not always consistent with it. It’s often completely absent in our attitude concerning cruelty to animals. Somehow we think it’s normal and therefore okay, because we’re real nice-loving-people in other quarters of our life.