Love, Kindness, And Solidarity Are The Most Radical Acts Of All

The longest night of the year calls us to practice radical love. 


I’m writing before dawn as I stoke up the fire to warm the house while a carpet of tiny ice crystals sparkles outside reflecting the full moon in the sky.


Rituals of light involving candles, bonfires, and holiday decorations prop up our sagging morale as we in the Global North struggle through the second winter of a pandemic more deadly than ever. 

source: Getty Images

The passing of Black elder bell hooks was an occasion to remind ourselves of her wisdom and fierce advocacy for love as the ultimate radical act. Her guidance:

love is a combination of six ingredients: care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust,

and so if you don’t know what you’re doing, just pull out that little card and ask yourself ‘in what way does my action that I’m taking reflect these traits, these characteristics, these values’

Tempers are raging in the world white supremacist patriarchy created. That world is filled with threats of violence, actual violence, and a hail of bullets at regular intervals. Videos shared on Tiktok went viral calling for last Friday to be national school shooting day. Previous campaigns motivated students to destroy school bathrooms and punch teachers.


Teachers are quitting in droves, and those still hanging on are posting anguished reflections on the rising tide of anger directed at them by parents who have come undone and children whose social opportunities boiled down to zoom and video games for a year. 


High school teacher Julie Holderbaum wrote:

Oh my God, another one? How many school shootings does that make this year?

Are all teachers as overwhelmed and exhausted as I am?

Does anyone care what teachers are going through in this country?

When is someone going to do something about it?

Health care workers also are operating in a state of extreme duress that can only be sustained for so long. Much of it is fueled by their frustration and despair as angry, ignorant people refuse to observe safety protocols to protect others: the little children too young for the vaccines, and the immunocompromised people too ill to receive them.


Brute force in the form of vaccine mandates has failed as those who study public health success stories knew it would. 

Irresponsible advice last spring — from the CDC no less — to take off our masks and resume commerce and in-person school led us deeper into the crisis. 


This month the White House press secretary sneered at a reporter who asked why the federal government does not provide at home tests for everybody like other countries do (i.e. countries with universal public health care programs). Simple, non-invasive PPE like N95 masks for all is still lacking.


Providing them would be an act of love, but the people have long since stopped expecting rule by corporations or oxymoronic for-profit health care to be guided by love. Will they share vaccine knowledge with the world or hoard it to increase their own wealth? You know the answer.


Scholar of failing empires Chris Hedges says that cruelty it not an accidental byproduct of the current system, it is the point


Our courts fail to punish sexual exploitation of children, protecting the powerful men and women in Epstein’s little black book.


Instead, a court in the government that capitalism and its foundation, racism, built, punish a Puerto Rican immigrant truck driver whose company vehicle brakes failed resulting in a crash fatal for others. 

Image source: “Viral TikTok Shows Truckers Boycott On Behalf Of Rogel Augilera-Mederos

Aguilera-Mederos manifested love when he said how he wished that he could have traded his own life for that of the victims. 


The judge sentenced him to 110 years. Silver lining in that particular cloud: truck drivers are refusing to enter the state of Colorado in response and over 3 million people have signed this petition asking that his sentence be commuted to time served.


Workers are unionizing like mad, hooray! Solidarity is an act of love — while condemning someone risk death for the bottom line is routine corporate behavior even in a weather emergency.

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/rjfpgu/amazon_tornado_text_exchange_your_life_is_just/


As the war machine churns out deadly poisons, accelerates climate change, and takes no responsibility for burning children to death in Afghanistan; as the social safety net tears beyond repair and your wealthy government responds by going on holiday; and its automated messages fill inboxes with ominious reminders of the resumption of student loan payments in January; as we struggle through the longest night of the year,


rememember:

love, kindness, and solidarity are the most radical acts of all.

Late Stage Capitalism Is A Death Cult — Change My Mind


Aerial view of candle factory in Kentucky before and after this week’s tornado.
Source: MAXAR Technologies via Reuters

I was sleepy the other night when I thought my husband said that there had been a 200 mile wide tornado killing people in Kentucky. Turns out it was a mile wide tornado (bad enough) touching down over a 200 mile area in several states (quite bad) in December (clear sign of a climate in crisis).

What he didn’t know at the time is that Amazon warehouse workers routinely deprived of their cell phones were buried under rubble when the roof collapsed.

Source: The Washington Time “OSHA opens probe into deadly Amazon warehouse collapse in Illinois”

Also that workers in Kentucky’s Mayfield Consumer Products candle factory who heard warning sirens and tried to leave were threatened with firing if they departed. Some stayed and died, some left anyway, and some stayed and survived to tell the tale.

The economic system producing both galloping climate change and burgeoning military budgets that drive climate change is a death cult.

Usually the claim “capitalism is a death cult” applies these days to the absence of public health policy that protects, you know, public health. 

One cannot serve both commerce and health as the CDC has bent over backward to demonstrate.

In the second winter of a deadly pandemic the U.S. has racked up this dismal track record:

  • no universal health care
  • no free testing kits such as the rest of the world receives (and derision from the White House press secretary for even suggesting this would be a good idea)
  • vaccine mandates rather than empirically proven access + education + incentive methods
  • feeble vaccine distribution to low income nations we share the planet’s germ pool with
  • miniscule economic relief for actual people (vs. corporations)
  • huge growth in the numbers of unhoused people nationwide
  • schools open despite higher infection levels and maxed out hospital ICUs nationwide
  • widespread health care provider burnout
  • obscene growth in wealth inequality


Extreme wealth inequality has been a significant force for toppling the social order throughout history. So have pandemics and other disasters.

Meanwhile, the engines of commerce churn on creating profits to buy off governments. Subsidies to fossil fuel corporations were $5.9 trillion in 2020, a whopping $11 million a minute.


That would buy a lot of testing kits. If only the U.S. prioritized life over profits.