A Sunday Reflection
There’s a word we still use easily in this country, even casually. Love. We fasten it to nation, neighbor, belief, cause. We speak it as though it were sturdy, immune to erosion, incapable of quiet retreat.
But love isn’t an abstraction. It’s a practice. It lives or dies in the small, ordinary choices we make about who counts, who is seen, who is worth the trouble. And lately something’s thinned. Not with spectacle. Not with a single breaking point. Just a steady cooling. A narrowing, like a room slowly losing heat while everyone pretends not to notice.
Wherefore love, when cities breathe disdain,
And pity learns to lower its own eyes,
When kindness walks our avenues in pain,
And charity is priced by careful lies.
I don’t mean romance. I don’t mean affection for what mirrors us. I mean the older, harder love. The kind that once animated public life. The kind that made room for mercy without calling it weakness. The kind that assumed other people mattered, even when they were inconvenient, even when they slowed us down.
That love once moved freely. It didn’t ask for credentials. It didn’t keep score. It didn’t wait to be rewarded. It simply passed from person to person, imperfectly, but openly, as part of what it meant to belong to one another.
Love once moved freely through the common air,
A dangerous grace, uncounted, undisguised.
It asked no oath, no proof of who was fair,
No ledger kept of souls to be despised.
Somewhere along the way, love learned caution. It learned to hesitate. It learned to measure and sort. We began to praise it loudly while practicing it less. We learned how to speak its name without letting it reach too far.
I see it in small places now. In meetings where no one quite meets another’s eyes. In public moments where suffering passes without pause. In the way we step around one another carefully, as if contact itself carried risk.
Now love has sickened, pale with borrowed speech,
Perfumed with slogans, starved of human heat.
We praise it loudly, never let it reach
The trembling hands that gather in the street.
We still talk about loving this country, but the meaning has thinned. Love of country once meant a fragile vow, that no one would be discarded unseen, that suffering wouldn’t be admired, that power would answer to care. That vow hasn’t vanished, but it’s been crowded out by noise and fear and the steady appeal of toughness.
We loved this country once with mortal trust,
Not as a shrine, but as a fragile vow,
That life would matter more than rule or lust,
That power would kneel to mercy somehow.
What replaced love wasn’t hatred at first. It was efficiency. Cleverness. Fatigue dressed up as realism. We learned to admire hardness and mock tenderness. We learned to call withdrawal wisdom and distance maturity.
But love grew conditional and thin,
It learned to sort, to flinch, to shut its gate.
It turned from wounds it might have entered in,
And named its fear prudence, calm, and fate.
A people can survive anger. It can survive conflict. What it struggles to survive is indifference polished into virtue, a public life where care is rationed and suffering is managed rather than shared. This is how the ground prepares itself for darker uses.
What grows from such restraint, so well rehearsed,
From hearts that ration care to feel secure?
A people armored, clever, and accursed,
Fluent in rights, incapable of a cure.
Decay doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t arrive shouting. It settles in quietly, wearing reason’s clothes. It tells us we’re wiser now, harder to fool, beyond old illusions.
Decay arrives not roaring but polite,
Dressed in fatigue, in wit, in knowing sneer.
It dims the soul, then calls the darkness sight,
And mocks the ones who still hold love too dear.
The real danger isn’t that love disappears altogether. It’s that it retreats from the public square. That it survives only in private rooms, in whispered loyalties, in small circles no longer held together by a shared life.
Where will this leave us, when love finally goes,
When it abandons streets and public breath,
And lives only where private sorrow grows,
Like contraband exchanged with quiet death?
Rights may endure. Institutions may persist. But without love, they hollow. They regulate. They endure. They do not bind.
Perhaps we will be spared no final scene,
No sudden fall to wake us from our trance.
We will awake efficient, cold, and clean,
And find love gone without a second glance.
So this is a lament. Not an accusation. Not a prescription. A public grief for something once practiced without needing to be named, now absent enough that we feel its shape only in its leaving.
And when at last we ask what has been lost,
No voice will answer, no confession sound.
Only the echo of a long unpaid cost,
And silence standing where love once was found.
Coda
This isn’t a eulogy. It’s a reckoning spoken while there’s still time to speak. Grief doesn’t mean love is gone. It means love has noticed what’s missing.
Love has never been loud or efficient. It survives in practice, not in declarations. It waits in ordinary places, in small public choices, in moments where care is extended without certainty it will be returned.
If this piece names an absence, it does so because absence is felt only where presence once lived. And what has been lived can be lived again, unevenly, imperfectly, but with intention.
That possibility hasn’t left us yet.
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Love your writing so much Dino!
Thank you Dino. I cried reading your words. It hurts to see the cruelty being done every day on our streets and in much of our government. Sometimes when I pause, breathe and connect with my friends I am unable to fathom how so many seem quite happy to choose hate over love. This sickens me and fills me with dread. I choose love.