{"id":54248,"date":"2014-05-04T15:59:03","date_gmt":"2014-05-04T23:59:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=54248"},"modified":"2014-05-04T16:09:15","modified_gmt":"2014-05-05T00:09:15","slug":"acts-of-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=54248","title":{"rendered":"Acts Of Love"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A month ago, Jeb Bush sympathized out loud with illegal aliens. He said April 6: \u201cYes, they broke the law, but it\u2019s not a felony. It\u2019s an act of love. It\u2019s an act of commitment to your family.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Love is just as often creepy and horrific as it is beautiful and warming. I don&#8217;t regard illegal immigration as an act of love, and I don&#8217;t automatically regard any act of love as a good thing. Same-sex marriage could also be described as an act of love and according to the Torah, same-sex sex for men is an abomination. <\/p>\n<p>Jeb&#8217;s sentiments reminds me of another speech about acts of love. This <A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1982\/07\/09\/us\/hinckley-hails-historical-shooting-to-win-love.html\">one was written out<\/a> by <A HREF=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/John_Hinckley,_Jr.\">John Hinckley<\/a> in 1982 just before his sentencing:<\/p>\n<p>&#8221;From the start, all I wanted was for someone to love me. I desperately wanted to be loved but I never could give appropriate love in return. I seem to have a need to hurt those people that I love the most. This is true in relation to my family and to Jodie Foster. I love them so much but I have this compulsion to destroy them.<\/p>\n<p>&#8221;On March 30, 1981 I was asking to be loved. I was asking my family to take me back and I was asking Jodie Foster to hold me in her heart. My assassination attempt was an act of love. I&#8217;m sorry love has to be so painful.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve watched documentaries about losers Lee Harvey Oswald, Mark David Chapman, John Hinckley and I feel like I understand what was driving them. They were failing at life. They were failing in their relationships. So they retreated to their fantasy world and desperately wanted to be important. I get that. Luckily for me, I was raised with a strong sense of right and wrong and so I would never do anything like what they did, but I get their frustration, their failure and their yearning to matter. When you consistently blow it at real life, you&#8217;re going to face strong temptations to retreat to dreams and to addictions and to discount other people&#8217;s reality. When you&#8217;re closely bonded with others, you&#8217;re much less likely to do this. Losers, on the other hand, often become <A HREF=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_True_Believer\">True Believers<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I dealt with my feeling of failure by embracing a hero, Dennis Prager, chasing women, converting to Orthodox Judaism, writing my heart out, enrolling in a decade&#8217;s worth of psycho-therapy and 12-step programs, and pursuing the Alexander Technique. <\/p>\n<p>Amalek: &#8220;You are too old to win sympathy based on your emotional needs.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A month ago, Jeb Bush sympathized out loud with illegal aliens. He said April 6: \u201cYes, they broke the law, but it\u2019s not a felony. It\u2019s an act of love. It\u2019s an act of commitment to your family.\u201d Love is &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=54248\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[906],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-love"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54248"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54248\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54254,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54248\/revisions\/54254"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}