Valentine’s Day is much like April 1st because we are fooled into becoming an unconscious part of a corporate business model. Valentine’s Day, invented by Hallmark Corporation in 1913, has become their biggest revenue generator—and the kind of barefaced consumerism that makes individuals weak and institutions powerful.
It may be fine for some to need a predetermined “official” day to say, I love you, because it avoids accountability for kinder and more frequent ways. The giveback though, is capitulation into sheepish servility and not thinking for oneself. All because we are led to believe that spending money on items like, cards, flowers and gifts is how to show love, when actually it is socioeconomic conditioning created by the industrial revolution.
Love knickknacks have outpaced fundamental need, so advertising is required to manipulate consumers into buying more, keeping people slaves to self-serving corporations. We’ve completely lost the original intent of honoring St. Valentine’s death and although Father Valentine, who was martyred in 270 A.D., for helping couples marry, may be the extreme… Somehow, we replaced our spiritualism with consumption, creating dangerous consequences like on Valentine’s Day in 1929.
On that particular February 14th, during what seemed to be a usual coffee and donut breakfast meeting. Seven top guys from the “George Moran Syndicate” gathered inside the SMC Cartridge Company garage to talk materialism, not true love. Midway through the agenda, men appeared in Chicago Police uniforms. Meeting about hard selling a certain illegal commodity and not keeping with the true spirit of the day, Moran’s guys complied with hands held in the air.
However, the visitors were not police at all. They were Al Capone’s hit men dressed up for the holiday. Before you could say Cupid’s arrow to the heart, Thompson sub machine guns were firing with sounds and sparks of festivity. The whole thing took less than eight minutes and all seven men of “Bugs” Moran’s gang laid dead in a pool of their own blood.
One Chicago City news reporter on the scene said, “I got more brains on my feet than I got in my head”. Later that day newspapers hit the street coining it the “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre”. A part of Americana one should avoid when buying into someone’s story, especially when it comes to saying, I love you from your heart.
Kevin J. Palmer
Challenging Economic Injustice
Morgan James Publishing. 5 Penn Plaza, 23rd Floor
New York City, New York 10001