I used to tell my Community Organizing students that we’re far more powerful when we fight for what we love than when we fight against what we hate. At the time, I wasn’t entirely sure it was true—but I thought it was and definitely wanted it to be. Lately, though, I’ve been asking myself whether I still believe that. Because the truth is: I’m angry. I’m afraid. I’m heartsick about what’s happening in my country. And when I look honestly at my own reactions, I can feel rage rising in me in ways I wish it wouldn’t.
In The Sacred Art of Lovingkindness, Rabbi Rami Shapiro asks a question that feels painfully relevant right now: Will you embrace this moment with kindness or with cruelty, with love or with fear, with generosity or with scarcity, with a joyous heart or an embittered one?
It’s a beautiful question. But my first response is How am I supposed to embrace this moment with kindness, love, or joy when I’m so damned angry, afraid and embittered?
Then I came across another passage this morning where Shapiro warns that unless we engage in a revolution of consciousness— cultivating the self-awareness to own our violence rather than excuse it—we are doomed.
This warning stopped me cold. Because there is violence in me right now. Not physical violence, but the inner kind— rage, hatred, a burning desire to strike back.
So I’m naming it. I’m claiming it. Not to justify it, but because I have always believed that honesty is a doorway to transformation. If I deny the violence that lives inside of me, I risk losing the clarity I need to act responsibly in this moment.
And this moment is dangerous. The threats to democracy we’re facing are real. They’re fueled by fear, greed, lies, resentment, and the deliberate dehumanization of entire groups of people. If we meet that energy with the same energy, we simply add to the fire.
But if we meet it with love—not the soft, gentle kind, but with fierce, disciplined love that refuses to surrender its humanity—we become something far more powerful than the forces trying to divide us.
Love is not naïve.
Love is not passive.
Love is not weak.
Love is strategy.
Love is clarity.
Love is resistance.
Love is how we stay human in a moment that is trying to make us forget our humanity.
So yes, I’m angry. I’m afraid. I’m grieving the country we truly seem to be losing while I’m wanting to fight for the one we still might return to or better yet, might someday become. And I know this much: if I want to defend democracy, I can’t do it from the small, constricted place inside me where hatred lives.
I have to move forward from the larger, braver place where love still insists on being possible.
And that is the choice I’m wanting to make —not because it’s easy, not because I’m in denial of my own potential for violence, but because I still need to believe that love is the only force strong enough to build the democracy we deserve, the one that Renee Good and Alex Pretti died defending.
So I’m asking you—whoever you are reading this—if it makes sense to you that we choose love as our way forward. Not a soft love, not a passive love, but a courageous, steady, justice-seeking love that refuses to surrender its humanity.
And I’m asking you to Speak up. Show up. Protect each other. Vote. Organize. Tell the truth. Refuse to dehumanize.
Let’s be the people who meet this moment with the kind of love that strengthens democracy rather than erodes it. The kind of love that builds the future we want our children and grandchildren to inherit.
The work is ours. The moment is now. And I’m determined to believe that love is how we win.
Spirituality, Therapy, and the Good Life 