We live in a time when Tina Turner’s question of “what’s love got to do with it?” is maybe the most important question of the age.  “What’s love but a second hand emotion?” seems the response and sales pitch of our present government.

In the Christian tradition, and many others, love is a commandment and not a suggestion.  Martin Luther King addressed this issue indirectly in his phrase “unenforceable obligation”. King said integration was an unenforceable obligation knowing that the work of love as a commandment is presented by his Chrisitian tradition as an obligation without a police force.  In the end, to be good is to chose to be good.  This is also called liberty.

Love is fluid, creative, generous, freely given, and rational, but its actions are guided as well as inspired by experiences of grace, mystery and feeling.  Hatred is simply a frozen thought gumming up creativity, generosity and  blocking all feelings except those that travel the broad,Good, Hatred, Addiction and “What’s Love Got to do with it?” paved highway of addictive rage. Addiction to rage is dangerous in the brain of a powerful leader because that person will lack, by virtue of their addiction, the nimbleness necessary to create solutions in a complex age or form lasting supportive relationships. Life is a dark transactional game for the hater.  I suspect hatred addiction is why this current government is wasting so much public American resource and time on revenge and retribution for crimes real and imagined. We have so many more critical things to accomplish as a nation and culture than obsessively pursue perceived enemies.

A Modest Proposal for Good

Rare is the human being who hasn’t been addicted to something, sometime, somewhere. Addiction can be to sugar, beer, liquor, meth, television, your phones, sex and so forth. As you know it is very taxing to manage addiction and even more pleasurable to give into addiction just before that habit hands over the bill on your life. But hate and power are also addictions and they are the two addictions you pray do not run the lives and minds of your leaders. The only good option we have right now as we watch hatred, fear and rage eat away at the American ethos is to exercise personal discipline and the vote. So vote both your good and your wisdom and show self-discipline as the epidemic of rage plays out in this culture from the top. Rage and hatred are the crack cocaine of leadership. Love of one’s neighbor is the unenforceable obligation of a true American.