It was both interesting and refreshing to note the thematic references to the power of love, made during last week’s Royal Wedding in London by Bishop Michael Curry, the first African American Primate of the Episcopal Church in the United States.
This was very much in keeping with what we have been advocating – the need to inject love, and all of its attendant benefits, such as respect, tolerance and sense of community, into our local political life.
A wise man once said that politicians would be so much better if they were motivated by the power of love, rather than by the love of power. The great Mahatma Gandhi put it in a similar way when he said: “The day the power of love overrules the love of power, the world will know peace.”
Bishop Curry said last Saturday: “When love is the way, there’s plenty good room – plenty good room – for all of God’s children. Because when love is the way, we actually treat each other, well, like we are actually family”.
If you come to think about it, love is the basis for finding genuine, long-lasting solutions to problems that our various societies face.
Here in Anguilla, we have had a history of a vicious, robust political culture that promotes the tribe mentality; that elevates conflict at the expense of partnership. Scores of our politicians have used the process to divide and conquer, understanding very well that unity is a force that could neither be bought nor compromised.
United action demands one for all and all for one – which will demand a political-cultural attitudinal change from what has been promoted: you’re either for us or against us.
Our view is that political maturity – maturity that will be the bedrock for the empowerment of our people – must influence us to move away from the tribe mentality. It must move us into the middle ground, where the sense of community becomes the common denominator.
The politics we have practiced over the last two generations is actually alien to who we are, at our very core, as a people. Ours is a small community that should be naturally and instinctively bound together by a shared history; where family ties run deep and bloodlines connect us together. And so, if for that alone, we all have a shared destiny which we must work for together.
I established a child day care centre in Island Harbour many years ago – a place where the children of ordinary people can go after school and be engaged in activities of learning, recreation and building their social skills. The centre was established not out of any personal need of mine, but out of an understanding of the needs of the community, as well as being motivated by the power of love.
In doing so, I was paying homage to my own childhood growing up in an area, and in a family and community, where we did not have a lot of material things, but where the love I got not only sustained me, but lifted me up.
I went through my school years, and went on to achieve my life’s dream of becoming a lawyer, through the shared force of the love of my family and the love of the rest of the community.
My success did not come through some grand political plan, or the fulfilment of someone else’s political manifesto, but from a community that showered me with love; and instilled in me hope and belief.
That force is still alive today. We just need to tap into it. We just need to reject cynicism and division; and replace them with hope and unity. We just need to embrace each other’s children as our own; refusing to make them victims of their parents’ political preferences.
As Bishop Curry said so eloquently last Saturday:
“Imagine our world when love is the way. No child would go to bed hungry in such a world as that. Poverty would become history in such a world as that. The earth would be as a sanctuary in such a world as that. We would treat one another as children of God, regardless of differences. We would learn how to lay our swords and shields down by the riverside to study war no more.”
My brothers and sisters: let us all – every one of us – join together in the united objective to eliminate selfishness, tribalism and conflict and to make Anguilla such a world as that.
