Try Love
First of all, what is love? The OED defines love as "Intense feelings of deep affection" amongst a smattering of different wordings to the same concept. It defines affections as, "a gentle feeling of fondness or liking." Combine the definitions and love is an intense feeling of deep fondness or liking.
Personally, I define love as, "a desire to make someone else's life better, more pleasurable, or easier; even if it comes at your expense."
So what does it mean to "Try Love"? On one level this means how you react to the actions and words of others. Since anger is the polar opposite of love (anger being the active form of hatred), this means never succumbing to anger: not lashing out with words you don't mean, not beating your wife (or anyone else, for that matter), not holding a grudge, and not looking for opportunities to shame others. On the second level, this means how you act towards others. By my definition, Love is a very similar concept to selfless-ness, but Love is more personal. It can be as simple as just holding the door for someone, smiling, and hugging them goodbye instead of shaking their hand, or it could be deeper, such as listening when they want to talk, letting them cry on your shoulder, helping them on a project for school, being interested in something because they are (were it not for them, you wouldn't care about said something). The third level is how you live your life in general. If you live a life of Love, there are just some things you don't do. Pornography and excessive drinking are easy examples, but it's not too difficult to look at unloving lifestyles that people around you embrace. The hard part is looking at your own life. On a fourth, and larger level, can you imagine not just an individual, but a group of individuals, a community even, built around love? Everyone helping each other, no one angry (or at least not acting on their anger), it would be heaven on earth (which I believe is a very real concept).
Why is Love so important that I feel the need to risk arrest and fines by spray painting it on public property? I mean "Love" isn't something we never hear about. 99.9% of all pop songs are written about love. But that's a different kind of love: romantic love. Love on the other hand, is, as I defined before, universal. You can Love your spouse and family, but you can also Love your friends, coworkers, classmates, etc. Romantic love is confined to loving your "significant other," and thereby loses so much meaning. Even the definition the OED gives loses meaning: love is an intense feeling of deep fondness or liking? What the hell does that mean? Fondness is defined as having affection or liking. It's a circle definition and therefore meaningless. Here's why I (routinely) risk the fines and vandalism record: people are so caught up in feeling romantic love, that they don't understand where it comes from. People are selfish. Families are dysfunctional. Hurting people are lonely, and lonely people are hurting. All of this could be alleviated (maybe even cured) by Love.
If people would just Try Love then there is no doubt in my mind that the world would be a better place. And if it takes a few bucks worth of spray paint to (hopefully) inspire someone, I'm there.
In this world of paint and pain,
....Try Love....