Editor’s Note: All opinion section content reflects the views of the individual author only and does not represent a stance taken by The Collegian or its editorial board.
In a world that feels increasingly defined by cruelty, division and exhaustion, love is often dismissed as soft, naive or insufficient. We are told that love is private and sentimental, something to be reserved for quiet moments or personal relationships, not a force capable of shaping communities, movements or history.
But this view misunderstands love entirely. To choose love, especially in the face of hardship, is not passive. It is radical. It is revolutionary. It is one of the most powerful acts available to us as human beings.
Humans have love at our core. Before ideology, fear and anger calcify into identity, love is what binds us together. It is what builds community and gives life meaning beyond survival. Love is how we recognize one another’s humanity and how we imagine futures better than the present. It lifts us up, gives us purpose and insists that connection matters. Throughout history, love has never been neutral. It has always been disruptive.
It is easy — especially now — to give in to fear or anger. We are surrounded by injustice, loss and trauma, both personal and collective. Anger can feel righteous. Fear can feel protective. Negativity can feel honest. But while these emotions are understandable, they are also corrosive. Left unchecked, they carve us out from the inside, narrowing our vision and isolating us from one another. Hate does not build. Fear does not heal. Anger may feel powerful in the moment, but it ultimately amplifies the very darkness it claims to resist.
Love, by contrast, requires bravery. It requires honesty. To love is to remain open in a world that constantly offers reasons to close yourself off. It is to care deeply despite the certainty of pain. It is to believe — stubbornly, defiantly — that people are worth fighting for. Choosing love is not the absence of struggle; it is the refusal to be consumed by it.
“To love yourself in a world that profits from your insecurity is radical. To love others across lines meant to divide us is radical.”
Loving people enough to demand more for them and ourselves has always been a driving force behind social change. Movements for liberation are sustained by love for what could be. Love for community. Love for dignity. Love for futures not yet realized. Without love, resistance becomes brittle. With it, resistance becomes resilient.
History is filled with proof of this. Again and again, love has been an act of rebellion. Queer people across time loved anyway — in secret, in defiance and in full knowledge of the risks — and in doing so built communities that loved enough to fight for the right to exist openly. Loving someone of the same gender was once grounds for imprisonment, violence or death, yet people did it anyway. Not because it was easy but because love was stronger than fear.
Throughout time, history was written by people who loved enough to change the world around them with its force.
Love has driven art in the same way. So much of the literature, music and paintings we treasure exist because someone loved fiercely enough to create. Love has propelled scientific discovery, too. Curiosity itself is a form of love: a devotion to understanding the world and the people in it. How many breakthroughs happened because someone loved another person, loved humanity and loved possibility enough to keep searching for answers?
This is why love is an act of rebellion. To love yourself in a world that profits from your insecurity is radical. To love others across lines meant to divide us is radical. To build joy after trauma, to extend care in communities that have been told they are broken or disposable, is radical. Existing fully and lovingly in a society that insists something about you is wrong is a revolutionary defiance of that lie.
There is a particular power in love that persists through hardship. In the face of pain, it is tempting to let bitterness harden into armor. But love asks us to remain porous and to allow hope to move through us, even when it feels risky. Love spreads outward; it does not end with us. It changes how we show up for others, how we listen, how we build trust and how we imagine collective healing.
I have always believed that love, joy and hope are the most powerful tools we have. Not because they ignore reality but because they confront it without surrender. To refuse to give up, to refuse to let cruelty have the final word, is an act of faith in ourselves and in each other. Sometimes that refusal looks like resistance. Sometimes it looks like kindness. Sometimes it looks like choosing hope when despair would be easier.
This is the point of living, I think: to choose love anyway. To reject the narrative that the world is irredeemable or that we are powerless to change it. Love does not erase suffering, and it does not guarantee victory, but it transforms us as we move through it. It drives out darkness, not by denying its existence but by offering something stronger in its place.
And perhaps that is the most radical thing of all: to keep loving in a world that expects you to stop.
Reach Hannah Parcells at letters@collegian.com or on social media @hannahparcellsmedia.
