Senator Andrew Bartlett
Tuesday, February 15, 2005
 
Love Itself

Being a curmudgeon at heart, I have an innate distaste for Valentine's Day. So I waited until February 15th to get this piece posted on the site, because it's all about love.

I was going through some emails earlier (a day that finishes with fewer emails in your Inbox is a day where you can feel you've made progress – a very flimsy measure of progress I know, but sometimes you grab on to what you can). In answering one email, I had cause to mention what is definitely one of the best things about being a politician, which is that I get to meet a huge number of people who do truly wonderful things as part of just living their life. There are people everywhere doing all sorts of things that make the world a better place for others around them, and if I wasn't in this job I'd barely have seen any of that. I'm not quite sure why we don't get to hear about all these inspirational people, but we don't, and it sure is nice to be able to meet so many of them. Sometimes I feel the most important task of government is to help people do these things (which can sometimes mean just getting out of their way and letting them go for it).

The flip side of this is that you also have contact with so many people and situations and actions which are just awful. Seeing how badly so many people treat their children (and other people's children) is one of the worst examples of this. Of course, my contact with such things is usually fleeting, unlike those who have to work in this field of broken lives day after day (many of who are included amongst the people I mention in the previous paragraph)

Sometimes you have to wonder what it is that makes some people go so badly awry. No doubt there are many things, but love and its absence has to be at the heart of a lot of it. I don't suggest that love is all you need, not least because that would mean quoting a Beatles song, and at present I'm trying to stick to quoting Leonard Cohen. However, an inability to access love, especially for a child, is unequivocally not a good thing – for them and sometimes for the rest of us too.

I was doing some research on the Internet earlier (no, really I was), and I came across a new web journal by Melissa Auf der Maur. She used to be the bass player in Hole, best known for its lead singer Courtney Love, but left and formed her own band. She did this piece in her web journal for Valentine's Day. Maybe it was because I read it just after I'd written the email I mention above, but the first part of the piece struck a chord with me. It was about unconditional love, rather than all that romantic love stuff that marketers distort into monstrosities like Valentine's Day. You can go to the site to read it all if you like, although as it goes on it gets a bit much for a wet blanket like me. However, I've pinched the first part and put it here, so I can easily find it if I want to read it again:


Unconditional -
The love that every baby that is born should be granted.
The love a good mother can't help but provide, it is her instinct, her gut, her truth.
Nurturing and accepting. Love over flowing with forgiveness.
Too often a child is denied that love, and that child grows up longing and looking for it.


I was lucky enough to get it from my mother, and my little girl is lucky enough to get it from hers. I guess I meet a lot of people who haven’t been so lucky and it's made life a lot harder for them than it could have been.

There's no way you can legislate for children to get unconditional love – even just a few years worth – but in case anyone does figure out a way, make sure you let me know. It would reduce the workload of (and maybe the need for) politicians by at least fifty per cent.

posted by Andrew Bartlett @ Tuesday, February 15, 2005 Permalink
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