Choose love, because the consequences of choosing hate get worse and worse.
Choose love, because choosing hate leads to teenage girls getting stabbed to death in parks in broad daylight (then mocked by bigots even as their devastated families mourn). It leads to terrified refugees having to hear baying mobs riot outside the rundown hotels which were supposed to be at least some sort of sanctuary for them. It leads to rancid pub bores being appointed to high office where they can raise the possibility of bringing back capital punishment and have other powerful people appear to take it seriously.
Choose self-love because it reduces the desire to hate. If you’re OK with yourself, if you’re happy in your own skin, you’re less likely to want to see others suffering just because they don’t look like you, or dress like you, or conduct their personal lives the way you do. (And, yeah, OK, self-love may well include having a wank when you fancy it, but the old condemnatory term of self-*abuse* might apply to those fascists who
seem to spend an awful lot of time looking at porn they noisily disapprove of: if they learned to love themselves and come to terms with their own sexualities they might start losing interest in the frenzied bigotry that now consumes them.)
Valentine’s Day might well be a commercialised celebration of heteronormativity, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a bit of fun with it – it isn’t a holiday I’m all that fussed about on a personal level, but I’ve always preferred seeking out what joy could be available to moaning and raging and looking for someone else to blame for my own discomforts.
Choose love. Choose hope. Choose pleasure wherever you can find it. Life is too short to seek out misery and cruelty when you could look for happiness – or help create it – instead.