Love as resilience and resistance

It’s me, back in your inbox/feed after some weeks away to rest after riding a wave of deep engagement and classic overcommitment. It’s a complicated pattern in my work — I very much love what I do, digging into complex, nuanced problems and possibilities often in close collaboration with others, but it takes a lot of time, energy and emotion. I am learning to ride these waves instead of letting them pull me under or merely watching from the shore.

For several weeks now, I knew it was time to return to regular writing. My head and heart have been swirling around this idea of working with love, my fingers twitching with readiness to type more than Slack messages and emails. The moment and I met spectacularly, as I witnessed the results of the 2024 presidential election and our nation’s reactions. My community’s reactions. My reactions.

The only thing I have to offer is response? In this moment, we need love.

It’s critical to define what I mean by love here, because it is most certainly not an acceptance of actions driven by hate and fear. It is not giving oppressive forces and figures permission to harm again. Love is not ignoring that our neighbors chose white supremacy, capitalism and patriarchy at the expense of our human rights and global wellbeing. That is not love, that is politeness.

My understanding of love is heavily influenced by the work of bell hooks, particularly her book All About Love: New Visions. While hooks explores love in depth, she doesn’t offer a simple copy-paste definition but seeds critical thinking and reflection on love against the context and conditions of American culture, economics and values, as well as human relationships. As October waned, I found myself pulling on many of these threads, especially the idea of love as an active state.

And we are in dire need of accountability and responsibility, from and for all of us, because this passage reads like it could have been written this November:

As many, many people have pointed out in just the past week, this weaponization of fear through technology and as a political strategy has accelerated lovelessness. Though published years before the advent of social media , hooks’ insights predate the reality of our current scroll-addled lives:

We exist at a moment of structural lovelessness, in fear of impending policies that allocate even more systemic power toward white supremacy and patriarchy and methodically strip away legal protections.

As this lovelessness continues its creep across our nation, aggressively and unapologetically choking communities and individuals like kudzu vines, we need to love. Love as a verb and action. It’s a choice. Love is the counter to isolation strategically deployed to carve out holds for this regime.

That means we need to do the work. We need to show up and act with love as individuals and community, because the road is long and the work is incredibly hard.

This kind of love is not passive, and we are responsible for stoking it with our time, talent and energy. We are feeling the wound of lovelessness deeply, and it is from here we can choose how to move forward. We can choose how to fight for democracy, for freedom and agency to live, love and in some cases, to exist as people. We are the keepers of love. We need to carry it as the powerful medicine, weapon, wisdom and shield it is.