A Call for Radical and Collective Love

Instead of a message of radical and collective love, some of our political leaders spew hatred and capitalize on it with votes.

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Lately, I have been thinking of a former classmate who died while we were in graduate school. He had gone to the hospital for a medical procedure that, I would later find out, he thought was minor in scope. He died on the operating table. The news of his death spread like wildfire on the small campus. It was not the first time that one of my classmates passed away. When I was in the fourth grade, there was a girl who kept having seizures and had one in the school’s playground on her way to school which resulted in her death.

I remember buying a card and mailing it to her home address few days after the death to express my sympathy for the loss. Then there was the guy who lived in the same dormitory as me during my senior year of college and who went home for winter break and never returned because he committed suicide. The dean of the college checked in with me (after I had learned of the death) and seemed relieved when I told her that I did not know the student (even though we would occasionally wave at each other in passing, like when he stood in front of the dormitory hall smoking cigarettes).