All You Need is Love

July 20. 2020

The term “Karen” is a very pop­u­lar name for peo­ple who aren’t exact­ly the kind­est toward minori­ties. It also just so hap­pens to describe mid­dle-aged white women with blonde hair. Although I have strayed away from using this term as often as oth­ers, I often find myself con­fused about one thing.

A big part of this sum­mer for me has been lis­ten­ing to the Bea­t­les. George Har­ri­son, Ringo Starr, Paul McCart­ney and John Lennon have always been leg­ends. But their mes­sages about peace and love real­ly hit home for me. I was born in 2003, yet these words in their music have affect­ed me and shaped me to be the man I am today. How come these old white ladies, who were teenagers at the height of Beat­le­ma­nia, seemed to miss these mes­sages?

The Bea­t­les are the great­est band of all time. Usu­al­ly, stuff like that would be up for opin­ion, but this seems to be a pret­ty known fact. Although in their ear­ly days they were just some pret­ty boys with cool hair­dos, they real­ly became intel­li­gent and mature musi­cians. From “All You Need Is Love” to “Hey Jude,” all their songs preached peace, love and accep­tance through­out the whole world. McCart­ney even wrote a song titled “Black­bird” for Black peo­ple strug­gling dur­ing the civ­il rights move­ment.

So now the ques­tion is, how did these mes­sages slip right over these people’s heads? Dur­ing the ’60s and ’70s, the major­i­ty of white peo­ple were able to afford Bea­t­les songs—albums were a big mar­ket at the time. So it makes sense that not many minori­ties res­onate with the Bea­t­les. How is it that the peo­ple who could afford their music didn’t learn any­thing? That’s like going to school and get­ting a doc­tor­ate in math and not being able to do 1+1.

It’s crazy how the same peo­ple who hate the protests we are set­ting up right now did the same thing dur­ing the ’70s when they protest­ed the Viet­nam War. Their par­ents, just like most of our par­ents, didn’t love the idea of protest­ing against some­thing in our coun­try. What changed? Because now we’re fight­ing for peo­ple of dif­fer­ent skin col­ors, the fight isn’t worth it any­more?

Peo­ple are peo­ple. Just because their skin col­or is dif­fer­ent doesn’t change the fact that they are human beings. These Karens were being blind­ed by racism.

Dur­ing the ’70s, there was a huge hip­pie move­ment. A lot of the peo­ple who come to our protests act­ing dis­re­spect­ful­ly were alive dur­ing that time. It was a huge part of their youth, and unless they actu­al­ly lis­tened to their par­ents, they were hap­pi­ly involved. Again, what’s the dif­fer­ence? Anoth­er youth group is protest­ing what they feel is wrong with our coun­try, and now they’re say­ing we sound stu­pid.

Hypocrisy on top of hypocrisy.

There’s noth­ing we can do that can’t be done. There’s no one we can save that can’t be saved. There’s noth­ing we can’t be because we can learn how to be us in time. It’s easy.

All we need is love.