Sympathy For The What!!!?

This is not going to be a post about Donald Trump. 

Gentle Reader, we shall wait for five minutes for the yelling, cheering and laughter to die down...

I was simply mentioning that name as an example of what I mean to say about unconditional love.  Either it is a beautiful truth or it is a beautiful fiction. 

I think it is safe to say that we all want to be loved unconditionally, without threat of the love being withdrawn: that no matter who we are, what we've said or done, who we have hurt, that there is always someone who will still love us, despite all that.  We want to be loved regardless of whether we deserve it.  We would almost think that we are entitled to being loved this way. 

It seems to go without saying that the closest we ever come to being loved unconditionally is by our own mothers.  No one else would ever be so committed to our survival, safety and wellbeing.  Fathers, not so much.  They don't have as much invested in their children.  In some cases they might love unconditionally their children but given my experience of my own less than adequate father one could say that I have my doubts.

The question here is very simple: can those of us who are not mothers, or are without children, ever come to love unconditionally?  Given that we all carry that need, that gnawing gaping maw hunger for unconditional love, why not try to give it.  Easy?  Oh, you are so funny!  Necessary?  Now,  that isn't at all funny.

It is all so easy to hate and vilify some while admiring and adulating others.  Some, thanks to that wretched chemistry of narcissism and media, set themselves up as easy targets of mass hate.  I will mention no names here.  But we see only the public image, dreadful, ugly, hateful and fearful.  We do not see the child that person once was, nor what they missed in proper nurturing and the limits that are set only by those who really love us as we are.  We do not hear the cry to be loved in these people and it is like this with any population that we wish to vilify: the homeless, addicts, criminals, bankers, Conservatives, Republicans, rap "artists", or smokers.  We are all generally very selective when it comes to loving others, and for one simple reason: we all suck dreadfully at it.  We still feel the lack ourselves, in most cases and are generally too lazy, selfish and fearful to risk ourselves towards those whom we perceive as being undeserving.  But you know what, Gentle Reader?  The survival of our species, this planet and the biosphere depend upon our mastering, or should I say rather, on our being mastered by, this higher love.  We have grown into an international network of quasi-democratic plutocracies and kleptocracies and bureaucratic dictatorships with ever-yawning gulfs of social inequality and this mass carnage of every billionaire for themselves is sending us into a tailspin that may put an end of us even before the next asteroid hits.

We are called to love.  Unconditionally.  The underserving, who deserve no more and no less than ourselves.  It is time to get to work.