I remember standing on the top riser with the Girls’ Glee Club choir at United Township High School in East Moline, IL spring concert 1974. The Glee Club was really the coolest choir at my alma mater. We got to sing current pop songs, folks songs, Americana – not those high-tone pieces with Latin phrases. Several of those songs pass through my memory from time to time. The one I have been hearing lately is from the musical “Oliver!”
The young orphan, Oliver, has been sold to a local undertaker. He is living in the cellar of the mortuary. Often abused (physically and verbally) by his “owner”, in sorrow Oliver sings:
Where is love? Does it fall from skies above? Is it underneath the willow tree That I've been dreaming of?
It seems a most appropriate question in our current world. As demarcation lines are being drawn that divide our “one nation under God” into intolerant, violent, angry, hate-filled communities. Disagree with someone then call them racist, phobic this or phobic that. Say it often enough it becomes truth. I can’t simply disagree with you – I have to destroy you!
Where is love?
Love is more than a warm puppy, Mr. Schulz. It is more than a feeling, Boston (dating myself again). It is more than kindness. Isn’t it placing others before your own interest and needs. I guess I am still naïve enough to believe that if you watch out for me and I see about you; then both our needs are met. Of course, there are different levels of love. I love “Frank’s” sausage and mushroom pizza. But that is a different care, emotion and action that is involved in my love for my family and friends. I would dare say I even love folks that I don’t know, don’t encounter in my day-to-day life. After all, we are all part of the same race – the human race! Thank you, Nancy Moran. My Gallery by Nancy Moran on Apple Music
In the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “South Pacific” we are reminded in song that hate does not come naturally to us “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” to hate. Two romances are caught up in racial tensions as a young U.S. Marine lieutenant falls in love with a local Tonkinese woman and nurse Nellie falls in love with a widowed Frenchman who has children by a native woman. As Lt. Cable struggles with this conflict he sings:
You've got to be taught to hate and fear, You've got to be taught from year to year, It's got to be drummed n your dear little ear You've got to be carefully taught.
You've got to be taught to be afraid Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade, You've got to be carefully taught. You've got to be taught before it's too late, Before you are six or seven or eight, To hate all the people your relatives hate, You've got to be carefully taught!
Lt. Cable dies during a spying mission. Emile (the Frenchman) and nurse Nellie are reunited in the final scene of the drama/musical. During the time Emile is on the island working with Lt. Cable, Nellie comes to love his mixed-race children. Love defeated hate.
Big Daddy was born at the end of World War I. He grew up in the lean years of the depression with his three sisters and five brothers. They lived off what they could trap or kill in the woods (ground hog, squirrel, possum, etc.) and what Grandma Nellie grew in in the garden. Big Daddy remembers it as hard times, struggling to keep all the kids fed and clothed. That life experience affected the rest of his life’s decisions. You had to learn to make things last. You did not waste food.
There was one thing he did not learn during those years. He told me often that it was not until he enlisted in the U S Army in 1942 that he was told he must hate those who are different than he. Oh sure, there were ornery people in the hills of his home place you avoided. There were even some that seemed to enjoy their anger and frustration with the situation of lack of food and other comforts. To hate someone and even initiate harm to them was so foreign to him.
He always looked for the good in his fellow soldier. It mattered not the shade of their skin tone, the shape of their facial features or even the accent in their voice. (He knew he sounded funny to them.) He looked through all that to the inside of the individual. Were they honest? Did they deliver a fair day’s labor? Were they willing to help another?
Look at our current world. We acknowledge the differences only to tear down, compartmentalize and destroy. We are told we are something simply based on our skin color, our ethnic background or our street address. How ignorant! How hate-filled!
I ask on this Valentine’s Day, like young Oliver – Where is love?