19 Mar

Respect before love

Publié par Audate Starson - Catégories : #Saint text

Humanity and the Desire of Peace

As always, going to convocation has never been an easy decision for me. Nevertheless, I continually end up getting something out of them all. This (that) week’s lecture had many key points. However, the one that was the most intriguing to me was the concept of love and the impact of such feeling when we make it a significant part of our lives as well as its differences when compared to tolerance.

Krista Tippett is a fascinating journalist who has been reminding us, society, of some of our big questions that we had been carrying on from one generation to another. She believes that our existence is like a chain to which every part has a significant role to play. To her, the sense of belonging and the need to be around those who accept us are a fundamental aspect of who we are as human. As we are progressing into a more technology driven society, we are becoming more reliant to our inventions. In addition to those advancements, we need to dig deeper in our inner human side. According to her, we can keep rethinking of new ways to answer some of our great questions such as why we are living, which we believed we had answered two generations ago.

Mrs. Tippett called for a new way of looking at moral imagination and social healing according to our time. One of the key points of her speech was a reinvention of our day-to-day vocabulary, and she believed that we ought to go far beyond stating fact when we are conversing. In our society, we had been trained to traded answers and ask poorly formulated questions that are susceptible to bring the answers that we want.

As she continued her speech, Mrs. Tippett laid a foundation for what our world should and ought to be; a world made of love. According to her, tolerance is needed in some occasions, but because it does not require any formal reaction, thus, insufficient to build the ideal society.

Personally, I believe that she had a powerful message to deliver. We can always make good use of some extra love. I like to see the best in everyone and because of that, the message of love was not hard for me to assimilate. However, I think it is practically impossible for someone to love another being more than himself or herself and that we should preach respect before love. I do not think that love is what we need first in this world. On a religious base, Jesus Christ required us to love our enemies while loving them the same way that we do. We need to see each other equal but different first before we can begin to love the dissimilarity in others. We need to be able to see one another and realize that what makes each of us worthy to be interested in is the part where you and I are not the same.

Philosophically, Aristotle advises us to know ourselves. To me, part of that self-analyzation is to learn to love ourselves despite of our bad qualities. What happen when we failed to love ourselves, are we still requires to give what we do not have?

Love in and itself is bias, and has for basis the need to find something appealing from the other person. If we are all different, if we all enjoy different things and we see the world differently while experiencing similar if not the same situation, why do we believe that we can all love each other? I would argue that the word “love” created more problem than it has ever solved either because we do not understand the real meaning of such word or that something else need to be recognized first.

I believe that if we try to promote respect instead of love, it would be easier for a kid to understand and would make sense to everyone. A child would understand that respect does not depend on how you feel about a person, it should not depend on race, gender or economical situation nor should it be based on whether or not the person agrees with your point of not. Respect is what needs to stay for a human being when everything is different then what society expects that person to be. It can be based solely on the foundation of life itself. I have witnessed family being wrecked while there was love between the parties, but there was no respect.

I am not saying that we should stop trying to love each other. What I am saying is that while feeling is unstable, we can build our foundation on more concrete concept such as respect. Nobody needs a course on how to love, as they will discover it themselves. We can start by respecting life itself, and respecting our differences.

Love is what a man needs to drop on his knees to propose to a woman, whereas respect for his relation will keep him from cheating on his wife. We can always live alongside the ones that we do not personally feel attracted to if we recognize them as human worthy to be respected.

With love comes preference and preference is the underlying mark of prejudice.

Starson Audate.