Can Love Save Us? (Yes, What’s Love Got to Do with It)

Los Angeles. The City of Angels. But today, there are soldiers in the streets.

The National Guard patrols downtown, not in response to a natural disaster or a national emergency, but in response to people - students, workers, families - protesting the deportations of their neighbors, classmates, loved ones.

The Trump administration calls them “illegals.” But those marching today call them community.

The use of military force against civilians in one of the most diverse cities in the country - against people demanding dignity and due process - should shake us to our core. But somehow, this has become normal in America. Somehow, uniforms and guns have become the default answer to voices raised in protest.

So, we have to ask ourselves: Can love save us?

It’s a tender question in a country built on conquest and control.

From the Boston Tea Party - where violence became patriotism - to the Trail of Tears, slavery, lynching, Jim Crow, Japanese internment, profiling and the surveillance and criminalization of immigrants, violence is not an anomaly in America. It is a language we speak fluently, often in the name of order, often in the name of God.

And yet, we still declare ourselves a Christian nation. A beacon of democracy. A place that tells the world, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”  But what happens when those masses arrive, when they speak, when they demand rights?  Rights we actually promised them?

Too often, we respond not with open arms, but with tear gas and rifles.

In LA today, we see the contradiction laid bare.

Protesters demand an end to raids, to deportations, to families being torn apart in the dead of night. They are met not with conversation or compassion, but with Humvees and riot gear. Just days ago, the same militarized response was used against university students rallying for Palestinian lives. Across contexts, the message is the same: dissent will be punished, not heard.

This is not the posture of a confident democracy. It is the reflex of an empire clinging to the myth of its own self-righteousness.

So what’s love got to do with it?

Everything—if we’re willing to redefine love not as sentimentality, but as a force for justice.

Love, true love, is revolutionary. It tells the truth about history. It refuses to let us look away from suffering - especially suffering done in our name. Love disrupts. Love resists. Love refuses to let power silence the powerless.

If we loved freedom the way we say we do, we would defend the right to speak, protest, assemble—even when it’s messy, even when it challenges our worldview. If we loved humanity, we would stop criminalizing migration and start reckoning with the policies, wars, and economic conditions that drive people from their homelands. We would stop calling people “illegal” and start calling them neighbors.

To call in the National Guard on peaceful demonstrators is not strength. It is fear masked in uniform. And fear, no matter how well-armed, will never lead to peace.

Can love save us?

Only if we let it.

Only if we are brave enough to live by it—not just in words, but in the choices we make as a country.

Today, in Los Angeles, we are being asked to choose. Between the violence of silence, and the risk of solidarity. Between fear, and love.

What’s love got to do with it?

Everything. 

#ThePowerofOuch  #Love  #BlackWomenLead #CivilRightsareHumanRights #LetFreedomRing  #ForgiveUs  #BEBrave