Elizabeth Lesser: Love is the Answer

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Thanks to Golden Age of Gaia.

by Elizabeth Lesser, Omega Institute

Valentines Day is the day everyone celebrates love. Romantic love, family love, spiritual love … L-O-V-E. It’s the day the whole world acknowledges that love is the answer; that all we need is love. This year on Valentines Day we get to acknowledge something else. We get to blast open a global irony and give voice to a suppressed truth: the truth that as long as women are kept down, so will love be unable to transform the world.

Every prophet, poet and saint has spread the gospel of love. Every religion has its own version of the Golden Rule. Yet every culture has silenced the very group of people endowed with an inner genius for love: Women. Throughout the ages, women have been violently suppressed, their ideas ignored, their sentiments belittled, and their presence denied from where the grown-ups make the rules.

We have the opportunity now to change this. As women take their seats at the global table, we can bring with us a new kind of power; we can validate love as a guiding principle in culture. We can stop equating virility with violence. We can measure a person’s smarts not only by the ability to reason and strategize, but also by the capacity to empathize and communicate.

And we can tell the biggest truth there is: that violence is a failure of imagination and the lowest form of intelligence. That love really is the answer. If you know this, join V-Day’s Billion Rising global love party. Come out and dance what you know on February 14.