As a good procrastinator, on Christmas eve day, I walked into my local supermarket looking for Christmases wrapping paper. Just going with the flow of the task of wrapping last minute gifts I walked to the area that held seasonal merchandise to find myself having an out of time-space experience. The seasonal merchandise area was all hearts and red! WTF! The few Christmases merchandise still visible were spread around like a long-gone left over mistake.
The stringent dissonance of seeing hearts and red and more hearts and red on Christmas Eve Day highlighted the superficiality our societal beliefs.
Christmas? What Christmas? It’s already December 24th, let’s promote Valentine’s Day merchandise!
By the way I was able to find the wrapping paper at a discounted price, since on December 24th, Christmas was already a past ghost. Lucky procrastinator! The brief moment of scoring big on the discounted wrapping paper distracted my thoughts but the hypermediated hearts and red visual-temporal dissonance coupled with the Christmas versus Valentine’s Day cultural idiosyncrasy immersed me back into my thoughts on how capitalism highjacked the true meaning of love and caring for others. (No, this is not a woke, socialist rant. Although I would love to have been eloquent and levelheaded enough to be one.)
Today, February 14, 2024, a little bit short of two months since my Christmas wrapping paper score against Valentine’s Day merchandise dissonance, again I ponder about love! The day of hearts and red feels out of place. The visual semiotic symbolism may be comforting and expected everywhere but now the stringent dissonance of war and hatred from personal to global events is splashed everywhere in the media, in radio, print, screen, social media. Not that I believe media is the culprit. Media is to me a reflection of what we as society look like. At minimum, what sells, and we want to see. (Again, the woke rant, get a life! Leave capitalism alone!)
Despite the abundance of hearts and red and “Happy valentine’s Day” shares, love doesn’t seem to be in fashion these days. This feeling is highlighted by the dissonance of the amount of hatred, discord, and differences shared by us all (guilty here too). Sadly, love feels like a long-lost friend, who we think of fondly and long for but don’t know how to rekindle the friendship.
From the little deck which I sit now writing these words, love feels like a private, unique, almost obscene experience we all feel among our own or in the privacy of our hearts but are unable, or discouraged to share with others besides hearts and reds. (Makes me think of how impersonal and superficial Instagram red hearts are, and yet, I am a sucker for them.)
Back to February 14, to me and my clan, Valentine’s Day changed its meaning completely in the year of 2022. It became a symbol of loss, the beginning of loss of love. On February 14, 2022, one of ours (my then super healthy and accomplished 32-year-old son) had a pulmonary embolism while driving from Maryland to New York. That on itself was a heartbreaking event since he could have died right then and there, but what came next showed us love in different form and color from the hearts and red.
The days following Valentine’s Day 2022 felt like a horror movie that would get even more terrifying from scene to scene. In a period of four days, each day, hour, minute would bring another blow of bad news: pulmonary embolism, maybe cancer, definitely cancer, metastasized cancer, surgery, too weak for surgery, test, tests and more tests. Chemo, surgery, radiation, pain were the most predominant words in our conversations following the diagnosis of testicular cancer yet, looking back, love; deep, meaningful, caring love, was the outcome that invaded us all! Love is what kept my son alive for 16 months after that dreadful Valentine’s Day. Love for life, family, work, and his newfound woman nourished him enough to endure the hell he went through. This is love, not the hearts and red!
Learning from my son’s experience, may love, real love, the one that moves mountains and pains, shorten the differences, has no ifs or buts and warm the heart be with us all, not just today, but starting today!