What’s Love Got To Do With It?

Remember that really groovy song from back in the day, “What’s Love Got To Do With It” by Tina Turner? That was my friggin jam. I listened to that cassette tape until it broke. Tina’s lyrics were a cynical take on love. And considering her story, one could understand why she was skeptical of love. Still, I appreciate the song and I want to apply it as a mantra to how we interact with one another and share information.

I want to sing those lyrics out loud whenever someone shares something about Trump, the media, some Q Anon story, politics, or anything that I find just irritatingly and utterly irrelevant. “What’s LOVE got to do with it?” Whenever I see someone pointing their finger at another person to “expose” them to “reveal the truth”, I want to ask if that’s how Jesus did it. Does that have anything to do with love?

What does love got to do with Trump? Nothing? Good, move on.
What does love got to do with Q Anon? Nothing. Next.
What’s love got to do with politics? Not a damn thing.
What’s love got to do with scapegoating? The two are opposed, really.

Do you see the pattern here? Let’s ask ourselves what’s love got to do with it? whenever we see something that irritates our ego and piques at our fear-spots. If the answer is that love has nothing to do with what we are getting riled up about, then we really shouldn’t give that thing, topic, or piece of information, any energy.

But let’s not conflate love with something else, like justification for gossip and scapegoating. Let’s not say that justice and love look like doxing and canceling on social media because that’s just plum ridiculous.

What Trump, Biden, and Jorgenson—she’s the Libertarian candidate running for President, in case you didn’t know that— are all talking about is focused on their personal gain and not on love or unity.
Everything that is streamed to you is for the purpose of gaining your attention, your emotions, and your free promotional capacity. You become free PR for people who are selling bullshit. Did you ever consider that? Your attention acts as fuel for advertisers, social media executives, and the money machine. You are literally just a body plugged in for the betterment of the machines, powering them with your attention. What’s love got to do with that?

More than that, you become wrapped up in the crap that you share so much so that it becomes a part of your identity. Today, I criticized journalistic attempts to throw shade on a candidate and bring to surface events that have always been occurring. I pointed out that the only reason anyone cared to write the story was that it was election season. Sure, the topic was unfortunate, but the fact that it was “newsworthy” was only because it makes a candidate look bad.  By granting our attention to the bullshit, we are perpetuating the bullshit. It’s a cycle. The only way to break it is to not participate with it. But instead, the person I was dialoguing with decided that I was attacking him personally, not the article nor the headline. We become enveloped in what we talk about to the point that we feel personally invested in the information, idea, or in many cases, the candidate that we want to win. We grant ourselves a false attribution to the topic and it becomes a part of who we are.

We are not news stories. We were not created to share news stories. Our purpose has nothing to do with making sure our friends don’t vote for the “wrong” candidate. We were created for love, by love, to make and spread love. That’s what truth is. The truth is love is all that matters. It’s a simple idea and we reject it because it’s so simple. If it ain’t got nothing to do with love, it’s not worth our time.

So ask yourself, what’s love got to do with it?