Valentine’s Day shows the light side of love. There’s a dark side, too. A world without love. And that’s the real reason behind so many seemingly unsolvable problems today.

Imagine being raised without love of any kind. Hell has been defined as “absolute, final and complete loneliness.” No love of any kind? That’s hell.

Your mother never experienced love, except the carnal kind, and sex without love is demeaning, exploitive and brutalizing. If you never had love, how can you give it?

That’s the beginning of a tough and daunting social problem that has been building for decades. All the sentimental, feel good approach to delicate egos and building self-esteem was foisted with no accountability either by those foisting or their hapless victims. Family, friends and even neighborhoods, used to set limits. No one dared cross auntie or big mama. Now, you better stay indoors and keep a low profile.

So we choose between prisons to keep in the unloved or gated enclaves to keep them out.

Certainly, there are no simple solutions. The Jesuits proposed something like “give me a child until age six and I’ll give you back the child you wished for.” Soviets tried some version of that by taking children from their impoverished birth mothers and raising them in institutions. They, too, produced a generation of monsters.

There must be a way to break the cycle. So many well-meaning religious and secular solutions have been tried.

Everything from recreation centers and matching mentors or role models, to Head Start, daycare and job training. Often results have been discouraging, but there have been successes and many have broken out of their cages of doom.

Failure to help the unloved find a way out is becoming more and more costly in actual dollars and in wasted lives.

This may be Mississippi’s most pressing problem, and the cause of so many other crises that it should be a major platform plank for politicians at every level and of every party. Except for a brief flurry of attention by Bill Cosby, no public figure has had the guts to approach — much less tackle — this charged, knotty and divisive national problem.

Those billions for Iraq sure could make a dent. Starting with a Department of Tough Love — DTL?

John Fontaine is a Northsider.