Welcome, gentle readers, to our belated Valentine’s Day edition—belated because we weren’t publishing Salient in that week of the holiday. Needs must, and all that, so here we present you with Issue 01 of 24: Love.
When Weezer were forced to rerecord their single ‘We Are All on Drugs’ for a more family-friendly audience, they chose to dub it ‘We Are All in Love’. Far more than just a mildly amusing factoid, this prompts a number of other rhetorical questions, Carrie Bradshaw-style. Is love just another drug? And are we all addicted? Has love, in fact, replaced opium as the opiate of the masses?
Love is incredibly complicated, but, at the same time, incredibly simple. It is contentious and courageous. Love can break your heart. Love is, in essence, a lot like the Pokémon Mew. It’s the worst thing ever—the total bane of your existence—when you don’t have it, but when you do have it, it’s basically the best thing, and you can’t really comprehend how you ever really thought otherwise.
Just as it is too easy to be cynical about love (by spitting eye squints at laughing, hand-holding couples on the street), it is also too easy to be optimistic about it. To find balance in a dialogue about love is like trying to find balance in a bouncy castle that’s strapped to a souped-up Ferris wheel. But that’s what we’re trying to do.
With this issue, we’re trying to have an even-handed discussion about love. What it is. What it is not. What it can be. What is the right way, and the wrong way, to go about it. Because love is important and deserves our respect, like a bear that controls the weather.
On another note, our thoughts are with those caught up in the Canterbury earthquake.
The last six months have seen New Zealand experience disaster on a scale almost unmatched in local living memory—culminating with the tragic events of last Tuesday.
This country is a small one. We are still, despite whatever prejudices any of us might hold close, an island village. The astonishing cooperation—whether from a volunteer army of students, those offering beds for residents forced from their homes, or the thousands around the nation and the globe who have pledged support and solidarity—is testament to perhaps greatest character of the ‘human spirit’.
With compassion, maybe an older and deeper love than as we know it now, we can be blinded to the barriers which we sometimes build around others without thinking. You will be hard pressed to find a lecture or tutorial not containing someone affected by the quake. All we can ask is your sensitivity and understanding of the anguish that such a sudden and violent event is able to inflict. The Counselling Service in the Student Union building is available to help you in this difficult time.
We grieve alone, but we thrive together.
With love,
Uther and Elle