Justice Is What Love Looks Like In Public

A reminder that we are in this together….

Jun 26, 2024

a pair of black and white shoes — Photo by Griffin Taylor on Unsplash

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Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public.” — Cornel West

There are times when I encounter a quote or bit of text and I am hit with the utter truth in the phrase. Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public. I’m going to type that powerful phrase again because I want it to sink in just a little bit more.

Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public.

I have been feeling deeply weary of late by the megaphone and amplification of the most strident voices in our culture and political system. It seems to me that the constant lifting up of the most uncivil and extreme voices has the effect of normalizing what is actually on the fringe of our culture, and that normalization has the effect of making unloving and extreme ideas more acceptable or dismissed as “business as usual.” Normalization of extreme (at best deeply non-compassionate at worst downright hateful) thought and messaging encourages others who would not normally repeat such things to follow suit. I have encountered stories this week of shocking actions that I can’t seem to reconcile. A woman in Texas was arrested this week for trying to drown an American-Palestinian child in a public pool, images of parents trying to find their lost children in the rubble of callous and calculated bombings, a pride celebration that had to be fenced and policed in Idaho because the participants needed to be protected from people who may be their neighbors, an extreme politician floating the idea of expanding reproductive health bans (even in emergency life threatening circumstance) to the actual repeal of a woman’s right to vote because in their opinion half of all humanity is unfit to make decisions of importance in their own lives, in our communities, in our culture and in our world, and in my own home state the GOP lifting up a candidate for Indiana Lt. Governor who made a name for himself in his book banning efforts and publicly announcing that the violence and insurrection on January 6th was “God’s plan” for America and his affiliation with Christian Nationalist ( which is actually an anti-Christian, anti-love, hate oriented extreme political movement) as if that were a good thing, a normal thing, not a shameful and dangerous thing personally and politically.

I am deeply weary of the normalization of the voices that lift up discrimination, racism, sexism, unbridled greed and disregard for those who are marginalized. I have a sense that you may be weary of these things too.

So what do we do in a time when such extreme voices are being amplified and normalized?

I believe it is time to be voices of love and reason, voices for loving our neighbors, voices for love of justice and fairness and empathy. As weary as I am, I am pressed forward because without voices that keep speaking aloud, “This is not normal, or good or fair or in line with our deepest most powerful values” the amplification of these extreme voices go unchecked and so accepted as valid political thought. I want to say aloud, justice and fairness and kindness (especially to those most marginalized) is what real love looks like in public.

I do my best to stay in dialogue, to be the change I want to see in the world. But there are times when silence is implied consent, and so I weigh daily when it is time to speak, time to listen, time to ask open honest questions and time to simply say, “No, this has nothing to do with any philosophy of love I know of.”

In my Substack posts I try to focus on what grounds me (and us) in the love we most want to see in the world. I want this Substack space to be a place where we can appreciate what lifts us up and supports a loving and meaningful experience of life, to rest in the knowledge that there is a wide community of care and compassion in that we all belong to, to remember that joy and a well lived life is an act of resistance, to share what happens at the heart of a good song or poem or story, to dig deep into what matters and let go of what doesn’t really matter all that much. I know that you and I and everyone around us gets tons of the hard as stone news of the world from multiple screens and sources everyday. So I don’t feel inclined to repeat what we all know if we are paying attention at all. You kind of don’t need me to tell you that there is really tough stuff happening out there. You already know that. But, here at The Gathering of Spirits I want to affirm that you are not alone in your weariness, and that you are supported as you sort through what is real and true and what is just being amplified as click-bait.

Let us remind one another that it is good to listen and stay open, but that it is also good to tell the story of love as we know it.