Stop Strawmanning Love
On Why Love Makes You Fight Harder for the Oppressed
The first thing that is said, always, is this: if you speak of love you must mean weakness. You must mean submission. You must mean that we are to stand before those who harm us and offer them our gratitude for doing so.
I have heard this for a long time. It has never become more accurate with repetition.
Love is not weakness. Love is the only form of strength that does not eventually destroy the one who wields it.
Love is not the absence of judgment. Love is not the erasure of the distinction between the oppressor and the oppressed. Love does not ask you to pretend that what is happening is not happening or that those responsible bear no responsibility.
Love asks something harder than that.
Let me show you what I mean.
Think of a mother whose teenage son has fallen into addiction. He is volatile and unpredictable. The younger child locks their bedroom door from the inside at night. Money disappears from the home. She watches her younger child flinch at the sound of the front door.
She protects the younger child. Immediately, fully, with every resource she has.
And she does not release the older one from her love. She shows up. She keeps showing up. Not because she condones what has happened. Because she understands that a human being who is abandoned to their darkness does not become less dangerous. They become more so. And because she is a mother, and a mother’s love does not have a condition attached to it that says: I will love you only as long as you deserve it.
loving the one who causes harm does not take away from your motivation to help the one who is harmed. In fact it adds to it. You are no longer fighting for one reason. You are fighting for two. You want to stop the harm and you want to save the one causing it from what they are becoming. That is not a divided motivation. That is a multiplied one.
Love does not ask you to do less. Love asks you to do more. To be more relentless, more creative, more willing to go the extra mile when everything in you wants to stop. Anger focuses the mind, and there are moments when that focus is necessary. But anger also narrows. It makes the struggle personal in a way that blinds you to resources you could have used, to allies you could have found, to doors that were open that you never tried because they did not look like fighting. Love keeps all of those doors open. Love sees the full picture. And it is only from the full picture that the full solution can ever come.