The Q-View

 

While I was taking Dom to pre-K on Valentine’s Day, a Beatles’ song came on the radio, and from the car seat behind me came the voice of a three-and-a half year old singing along to the chorus.

“All you need is love.”

I did the instrumental: da-da-da-da-da

“All you need is love, love, love is all you need.”

Dom did a lot of talking on the way in; it probably was not a good idea to let him have some Valentine’s Spiderman chocolates.

He told me his eyes changed colors.

“Why?”

“I’m a superhero.”

“What are your powers?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can you fly?”

“I don’t have a cape on.”

Stupid question on my part.

We went through some potential powers, and he somehow decided that he was a pilot and was flying the car.

“Do you know what type of car this is?” I asked. “A Pilot.”

I don’t think he got the irony.

We discussed directions: north, south, east, west, and he made me promise to stop at a church we passed so he could ring the bell.

Ahem. Next time.

We were a little early arriving at daycare so I hung around to keep him company. There was a class collage of pictures that we stopped to view, and Dom pointed out his friends, including Lucy the guinea pig.

We climbed up to “The Loft”, a two-level play area to get a better view.

Little kids, black, white, Asian, male, female dribbled in with harried parents before settling down to color, read, draw, and play.

So much innocence. So much love.

Several years ago I was in the high school’s TV studio. One of my senior students was helping me clean up when we noticed news of the Sandy Hook school shooting streaming from one of the monitors.

“Why is this happening?” she asked tearfully.

Several years later, no one seems to be able to answer that question.

All you need is love?

Maybe another line from the song is more appropriate: “There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done.”

If you are motivated by true love for fellow human beings and not by your ideologies and your politics and your myopia and your narcissism, maybe something would get done.

Those who can effect real change need to see every child in this country as their own offspring whom they would protect to the death, like the adult heroes at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and Sandy Hook and Columbine and…where next?

All you need is love.