The Price of Love

    I recently watched John Green’s video “Motivation in Hard Times”, one of those video’s people make to attempt to help those struggling with sadness and worry over the state of their lives, the way pretty much everyone is right now. The point of the video was that it’s important not to let yourself be consumed by anger and to instead focus on those you love, but one part that stood out to me was when he said, “Anger burns dirty, leaving a whole inside you, while love burns clean.”, Well at least that was the general gist of it.

     Central to our cultural narrative is the idea that love is important, that our lives should be focused on seeking the approval of our friends and family. Like all narratives, you will find people pointing out how this isn’t true, and how pushing this idea onto others in harmful, kind of like how I’m doing right now. But I think it’s important to know that love, like most things, isn’t inherently evil. It helps people struggling, gives them a reason to keep going, keeps them focused on something that matters to them.

   Anger can also do that. I think most of us forget that there are those out there who, for whatever reason, can’t find love in their lives, either because they screwed up or because their community abandoned them. We forget that when we push the narrative that acting out of love is better than acting out of anger or spite, we’re pushing people who’ve been forgotten by the world to give up their inner selves in the hopes that society will take them back. For these people, anger may be all that they have left, and they often hold onto it long after people who care about them come into their lives.

    I should also mention that love can be damaging in it’s own way. In this day and age, I think all of us have seen at least one person we care about, either among our friend group or online, do something we regard as horrible, something that leaves us asking if we should give up on them to preserve our integrity or keep them in our lives because they matter to us. Morality demands we stand for what we believe in, but so many of us have stories about people we love getting involved in conspiracy theories, and love has no good answers for how to save them or ourselves.

     I don’t believe anger to be inherently evil, nor do I believe love to be inherently good. One thing I learned in AP Environmental Science is that ecosystems require a healthy balance of all sorts of resources, and sometimes you don’t know what’s important until you remove it. I believe we should value all of our emotions, and acknowledge that there are many wrong ways of doing things that people do, just as there are many right ways of doing things, but if we want to know the difference, we have to admit our feelings to ourselves.