TODAY IS VALENTINE’S Day, which I like to think of as VD, because not all love affairs will be celebrated with a red rose at a fancy restaurant tonight, and some will be stopping off at the doctor’s office before arriving at the courthouse.
There’s not necessarily all that distance between Valentine’s Day and venereal disease.
Today, nearly everyone will be celebrating VD in those parts of the world where people can afford to think about roses and chocolate and not whether they’ll get a cup of clean water to drink; which is good. I hope to be celebrating with my own Valentines, three of whom, I’m happy to say, I have (though one of them actually delivered the other two).
But many people will be taking part in hollow celebrations.
The writer Ian McDonald, author of the definitive West Indian novel of idyllic childhood and innocence lost The Hummingbird Tree, and still, thankfully, the star columnist of the Sunday Stabroek – how good it was to have Ian to look forward to in Guyana, yesterday, when we buried Keith Smith in Trinidad on Saturday – has written often of the immeasurable delight of a long-lasting love affair.
Two years away from the age of 80, Ian has been married to the same woman for longer than many of us have been alive. I hope to emulate him; in his personal life, too.
But most people don’t experience that kind of deep, long-lasting love because they don’t work for it.
The first time I got married, one in two marriages ended in divorce; the last time I got married, it had gone up to two in three.
Yes, it is important to celebrate love in a world filled with hate, but it is open, respectful communication in the light of day – not candlelit dinners – that create healthy, loving relationships. The hard work of communication cannot be replaced by roses or chocolate.
Mentioning communication’s hard work leads to my two letter writers, Oswald W. Newton, who writes very well but seems not to understand to the same degree, and that other one who stretches the concept of free speech into wrongly portraying what I said and then demanding apologies; she I dismiss entirely.
Let her apologize for what she said I said, since I certainly never did and most certainly never will.
The good Ozzie continues to assume as correct what he should be proving. If the Bible says something different from the science, the Bible is wrong, not the science. Ozzie is free to believe the Earth is 6 000 years old and homosexuality is wrong, because the version of the Bible he happens to believe is the Word of God says something he interprets as saying so.
But science proves the Earth is 4.5 billion years old and between three and 11 per cent of any population in the animal kingdom may be homosexual.
In a civilized society, a citizen’s freedoms should be curtailed only for a very good reason; and someone else’s belief is simply not a good reason.