Editorial: Make Valentine's Day a national holiday

What do we know of love?

Monday is Valentine's Day, and lovers young and old will observe it with roses, chocolates and gifts, and with intimate dinners and celebrations.

The greeting card companies treasure the day, of course, and it would be remiss to forget a sweet card as part of your endearment to a significant other.

But it is more than a Hallmark holiday.

It is a celebration of love, and given the importance of love in this world - and particularly given the conflicting rise of intolerance, anger and apparent hate in our culture - it is a shame that it is not a national holiday.

There, we said it. It's time the Congress and the president declared Valentine's Day a national holiday.

That seems like it ought to be something that both Democrats and Republicans can embrace.

"The one thing we can never get enough of is love," novelist Henry Miller said. "And the one thing we never give enough is love."

Certainly, if love is not worth taking a day off from work, struggle and strife, what is?

If our government truly believes that "the pursuit of happiness" is an inalienable right, well, is not love a central ingredient of happiness? Is it possible to be happy without love?

While Valentine's Day is not formally recognized as a state holiday anywhere on the planet, as far as we're aware, it is a tradition in numerous parts of the globe, having its roots in a Christian feast declared more than 1,500 years ago by Pope Gelasius that later evolved into a ritual in honor of romance.

The day is a commemoration of that and so much more. Or at least it ought to be.

"Love," the 14th century Italian poet Petrarch said, "is the crowning grace of humanity, the holiest right of the soul, the golden link which binds us to duty and truth, the redeeming principle that chiefly reconciles the heart to life and is prophetic of eternal good."

We live in a world that is occupied by so much trouble, brutality and animosity. The political debate in our country seems increasingly to be consumed by vitriol and dehumanizing insult.

Don't we as a people yearn for inspiration? Don't we need a call, as Lincoln described it, to "the better angels of our nature"?

Finding those better angels in ourselves is one of the missions of life. Isn't life's journey a quest to learn how to love unconditionally? To learn to love as a parent loves, without requiring any reward beyond the love we give itself?

"Love is, above all, the gift of oneself," the French playwright Jean Anouilh said.

He was right but only in part. In the giving, it also is a gift to oneself.

Yes, we make an audacious recommendation here. But it also is one with merit.

There is a reason Valentine's Day is universally observed. Love is good.

Let's endorse and encourage it as a country. Let's make it a national holiday.