Perhaps I heard the phrase “can’t see the forest for the trees” prior to “Different Drum” (1967) by the Stone Poneys (which song launched Linda Ronstadt to superstardom) —
“But honey child I’ve got my doubts
You can’t see the forest for the trees”
— although I doubt it.
Unfortunately today one is as unlikely to see the trees for the forest as the forest for the trees (and not in a beneficial way):
Culture wars rive the country because political strategists know how to yank everyone’s chain adeptly, ensuring that people are more attuned to hot button issues than to more crucial concerns such as a cohesive country, cordial relations with friends and neighbors, and a commonwealth (the first definition of which in Merriam-Webster is “a nation, state, or other political unit: such as one founded on law and united by compact or tacit agreement of the people for the common good”).
It might be commended to reconsider priorities at St. Valentine’s Day.
The Original Caste song “One Tin Soldier” (1969) reminds us how easily one can dissemble, assuaging doubts about acting uncharitably:
“Go ahead and hate your neighbor,
Go ahead and cheat a friend.
Do it in the name of Heaven,
You can justify it in the end.”
Does anyone feel better in the fullness of time for engaging in dishonorable behavior rather than taking the high road?
A conundrum in culture wars dichotomies is that individuals appear to lose appreciation for the various facets of love. Contemporary culture defines love as erotic whereas love traditionally enjoyed various manifestations.
C.S. Lewis’ “The Four Loves” (1960) provides a starting point for exploring the faces of love. Lewis defines the quartet as 1) storge: love flowing from empathy, 2) philos: love flowing from friendship, 3) eros: love flowing from romance, and 4) agape: love flowing from God.
I wish that I were a student at university, able to spend a semester studying the different aspects of love: Simplistic misunderstanding of love visits unreasonable expectations and unsustainable outcomes on society.
If love is only explored as eroticism, society reaps what it sows: a sexually charged dynamic, more suitable to animals at mating season than to a functional society — exemplified by smut such as Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler and films produced in the San Fernando Valley (which, while factchecking, AI confirms to be “the primary epicenter of the American pornography industry”, nicknamed “the San Pornando Valley”).
Should eroticism be love’s apogee in the twenty-first century west, another society shall eclipse ours.
Western society can only survive if we demonstrate love for other human beings and cohere as a country. The reality is as old as the initial hominid and as salient in the present and future as anything that humankind can do in pursuit of self-preservation.
The lodestar is the Golden Rule revealed by Jesus: “And just as you want men to do to you, you also do to them likewise”, Luke 6:31 NKJV.
Sympathetic symbiosis cannot occur on an interpersonal, communal, or international basis if people focus upon that separating them — what they do not share in common — instead of mutual commitments and outcomes.
Those emphasizing race, creed, or color, political affiliation and class differences — “my tribe” — act in a manner antithetical to our religious heritage. We must celebrate that which we have in common with others, not that upon which we will never agree.
I ask, at St. Valentine’s Day, that you invite a colleague or neighbor with whom differences seemingly eclipse commonalities to lunch, initiating annual effort to foster love beyond the romantic.
“Reach Out of the Darkness”, a 1968 song recorded by Friend & Lover, conveys,
“I knew a man that I did not care for
And then one day, this man gave me a call
We sat and talked about things on our mind
And now this man, he is a friend of mine”
If everyone reaches out of the darkness, individually inculcating healing of the planet, one-by-one, each of us can catalyze the dawning of a better day.
Jay Wiener is a Northsider
