All you need is love
The Beatles were right. All you need is love. “There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done.
Nothing you can sing that can’t be sung. Nothing you can make that can’t be made. No one you can save that can’t be saved.” This song was created as an international message of love that could be easily understood by people of different nations. It reflected the feelings of its young composers John Lennon and Paul McCartney during the Summer of Love in 1967. This song was performed by their band during the first live global television show “Our World.” Over 400 million people from 25 countries watched its broadcast on the 25th of June 1967. If you’re not familiar with the song, it appears on their Magical Mystery Tour album. Find it, play it. The message is clear and true and needed so much now more than ever.
We look around us and see so many things that are wrong. We feel it’s hopeless sometimes. We get all caught up in everything we disagree with and everyone with whom we disagree. We blame each other. We grow apart. Trust breaks down. We stop loving one another. And most every message we receive from the broadcast and print media, the Internet and from social networking distances us from each other even more. We grow increasingly more polarized. We become tribal. We see black people and white people and oppressed people and oppressors. We see Democrats and Republicans, Christians, Jews and Moslems, rich people and poor people, women and men. We see all the differences and none of the sameness, none of what makes us all human, all one. We stop seeing our fellow human beings as our brothers and sisters, the human family.
The purpose of what I’m writing is to get us to hit the pause button on our hatred, our contempt, our intolerance. If we are ever to recover from the devolving madness of blaming one another for our troubles, we must start loving each other again as I believe we were intended. Look around you in your daily life and see what you can do to make the world a better place instead of complaining about it. Let your black or white brothers and sisters know that you do not accept the narrative that we are inherently this or that. Stop seeing what’s wrong with others and work on yourself instead. Reassure the ones around you that you love them for who they are. Make sure that in your own life, you express goodness to other people and see the goodness in them. Tell your wife or husband how much you love them. Hug your children. Give flowers for no particular reason. Be kind. Be patient and understanding.
Sow the seeds of love. Be the Johnny Appleseed of compassion and cure more than COVID, but all the ills that plague our world. It all starts with you and all you need is love.
— Howard Glasser, Kelseyville