Let Love Be The Uprising
By Sarah Hackney
There is something profoundly dangerous
about people who refuse to stop loving
in a world that profits from their hatred.
Who look upon the machinery of cruelty
and dare to place their bodies
between its teeth and the innocent.
Who understand that peace
is not the absence of resistance,
but the presence of justice.
Let history remember
that there were those who stood
when standing came with consequences.
Who refused to make a religion of obedience
or mistake a flag for a conscience.
For what is patriotism
if it cannot bear the weight of truth?
What is freedom
if it must be purchased
with another person’s suffering?
No nation is made great
by the silence of its wounded.
No law becomes righteous
simply because powerful men
have learned to pronounce it.
And no human being
should have to prove their humanity
before being granted mercy.
There is a particular kind of courage
in remaining tender
when the world rewards brutality.
In feeding the hungry
while politicians debate their worth.
In sheltering the stranger
while borders are sharpened into weapons.
In holding the frightened
while the comfortable call their fear
an inconvenience.
Let compassion become defiance.
Let every act of kindness
be an indictment of indifference.
Let the streets fill
not with a hunger for vengeance,
but with a love so uncompromising
that injustice finds nowhere left to hide.
Because the revolution worth having
will not ask us to become
the monsters we oppose.
It will demand something harder.
That we protect without possessing.
That we fight without surrendering our souls.
That we refuse to inherit
the prejudices of our ancestors
and call them tradition.
And when the powerful ask
why the people have grown so restless,
let the answer be unmistakable:
Because children deserve tomorrow.
Because dignity is not a privilege.
Because the earth is not a commodity
to be exhausted for someone’s fortune.
Because the forgotten have names,
and the disappeared had mothers,
and every life discarded by indifference
was an entire universe to someone.
Let them call this radical.
There have always been people
who considered equality an offense
and liberation a threat.
But the future does not belong
to those who can build the highest walls.
It belongs to those
who keep opening doors.
So let the heart remain fierce.
Let the voice remain ungovernable.
Let the hands remain gentle enough
to cradle what the world has nearly destroyed.
And when they ask
what weapon we carried
against an empire of indifference,
tell them:
We carried bread.
We carried names.
We carried the wounded
when the world told us to leave them.
We carried each other.
And when they tried to bury us
beneath their laws, their lies,
their monuments to power,
we did not become the darkness
they had made for us.
We became the fire
that taught the darkness fear.
Not because we learned to hate
more fiercely than they did
but because we loved
what they were willing to destroy.
And if history must remember us
for only one thing,
let it be this:
They built a world
that required us to stop loving
in order to survive.
We loved anyway.
And their world
did not survive us.
Sarah is a Choctaw/Chickasaw tribal member. She is also a board member of Missing Murdered Indigenous Women-CHAHTA.
