As we finish honoring the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., it is appropriate to reflect that he believed in an outdated idea: love. Today, it is easy to consider love to be a bunch of hippie B.S., just another acid casualty that went out with Woodstock and Altamont. Indeed, we have inherited much from the hippies -- we are liberated enough to speak casually of blowjobs. But the tongue stumbles when it catches upon "love."
I mean not only love in the erotic sense, but also in a wider one -- love for humanity, the love of parents for their children, platonic love between friends and, indeed, love for one's enemies.
Dr. King had all of these in abundance. In a way, he helped not only black Americans to become free through love, but also the people who hated him. By refusing to attack the racists who were keeping down black Americans, he exposed their evil to themselves and others, without allowing any violence to counterpoint them and obscure their hatred.
I remember hearing someone once observe that the Dalai Lama was similarly not trying to help the Tibetans regain their homeland, so much as he was trying to help the Chinese Government overcome its own negative qualities by refusing to offer it anything but the olive branch and the embrace of friendship.
Few can doubt that this approach -- one currently embodied both by His Holiness and by Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma -- is the most dignified, befitting of an authentic human being.
Yet so few are willing to make love their cause. As the apotheosis of King and Gandhi serves to show, love is something for which you give up all of your own interests and on which you are ultimately crucified. The vast love of humanity embodied by King and Gandhi is not the only form of love that requires this endless vow.
Any form of true love does: a parent must be willing to die to save his child, a lover for his beloved and a true altruist for even those who don't like her.
The lover has merged so totally with the beloved that there is no question of self-interest, no question of reason.
Naturally, we are all scared of plunging into love. It is much easier to satisfy our appetites with shallow, meaningless sex and an escape into the fantasy world of various drugs. I sympathize with these impulses, because I have them. But how much of the sex on campus occurs between people who love each other, who would die for each other? How many of us think of those who raised us, bathed us, clothed us and provided us with that unpayable debt, that limitless labor of love, and conclude that we would never consign them to a nursing home?
The nature of love terrifies petty reason because of its sky-like limitlessness, because of the power it has to refute those philosophies that seek to quantify the human spirit.
I'm sorry if any of this sounds preachy. I only write it because I feel that what Stevie Wonder once said is true around the world and particularly on our campus: "Love is in need of love today."
I know that I rarely think about love or talk about it. Love seems somehow bigger than I am; it is far easier to lapse into some jaded, nihilistic conversation than to engage with the idea of universal love.
But, corny as it may sound, I still believe that love is the most powerful force on Earth. Although I have never practiced Christianity, it seems safe to say that "Love your enemies" and "God is love" are two of the most revolutionary statements ever made.
It is so much easier to selfishly waste one's days getting high on one's own ego, "laying your trips" on people, as hippies used to say (whether that is the Christan trip, the atheist trip, the Post-Modernist trip or the dope trip), than to heed the self-sacrificing commandments of love. But in this day and age, when it seems necessary to broaden our love not just to all of humanity, but also to other species and nature, love is in painfully short supply.
So, although Dr. King pursued justice passionately, love was always his means. Paradoxically, it was mercy that led to justice, not the doctrine of "an eye for an eye," which continues to be advocated by so many.
The example of Dr. King should remind us that love is the most effective way for us to deal with both our personal relationships, and with the world around us.
