When Will We Love Again?

Dear brother, dear sister, my neighbors of the Earth,

One inevitable question to the AI in my moments of important sadness.

This is its answer and I totally agree.

Let's see read it together:

"It isincredibly heavy to look at the world, see the profound vulnerability of children being exploited, notice human rights being trampled, and watch those responsible walk away without consequence.

It makes complete sense to feel a deep sense of exhaustion, anger, or even a quiet despair. When accountability is missing, it feels like the very foundation of safety and love in our society is fractured.

The question "When will we love again?" isn't just about a feeling; it’s a plea for systemic healing and a return to shared humanity.

Historically and socially, that "return to love" usually doesn't happen all at once from the top down. It happens in the trenches, driven by three powerful forces:

• The Power of Furious Love: True love in the face of injustice isn't passive or soft—it is fierce. It is the love that fuels advocates, whistleblowers, and community protectors who refuse to look away. When the global macro-system fails, people build micro-systems of protection, sanctuary, and care for those who have been hurt.

• The Demand for Institutional Restructuring: The "non-accountability" that we see, is a design flaw in our institutions. Love looks like forcing accountability through legal reform, international pressure, and unrelenting documentation of abuses. Laws and human rights tribunals are, at their best, love codified into protection.

• Healing the Transgenerational Trauma: For children who experience abuse, breaking the cycle of trauma is the ultimate act of reclaiming love. When survivors are supported, validated, and given the space to heal, the trajectory of the future changes.

  
  

We find our way back to love when we stop waiting for institutions to suddenly grow a conscience, and instead join the people who are actively forcing them to behave better.

Love returns in the actions of the people who refuse to let the injustice become normalized.

If you are carrying the weight of these observations right now, remember to protect your own peace, too. You cannot fight burnout with a burnt-out mind.

Naming the places—Palestine, Gaza, Congo, Sudan—carries an immense, devastating weight.

To look at them all at once is to witness a massive, interconnected map of human suffering, structural failure, and a terrifying lack of global accountability.

When you see children facing starvation in Gaza, mass displacement in Sudan, and decades of neglected conflict and corporate-driven exploitation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, it is completely natural to feel a profound sense of horror and alienation from the concept of a loving world. It feels like the international systems we built to say "Never Again" are just watching it happen.

When the macro-world feels entirely devoid of love and justice, it helps to look at where love is surviving under pressure. It doesn't look like a soft sentiment; it looks like survival, resistance, and radical solidarity.

The Geography of Fierce Love

• 

  In Gaza: Love looks like the medics, the remaining physiotherapists, nurses, and doctors who refuse to leave the sides of their patients, working in hospitals on the verge of collapse. It looks like the soup kitchens run by displaced people feeding other displaced people, and the journalists risking everything to ensure the world cannot claim ignorance.

• In Sudan: Amid the world's largest internal displacement crisis, love looks like the "Emergency Response Rooms"—grassroots, youth-led mutual aid networks. When international aid was blocked or stalled, local Sudanese citizens set up communal kitchens, organized medical supplies, and evacuated neighbors under fire.

• In the Congo: For a decade, the DRC has topped the lists of the world’s most neglected crises, yet love looks like the local civil society organizations and community leaders who persistently demand sovereignty over their lands, document human rights abuses, and protect children from forced recruitment, even when global media looks away.  

  
  

Where Does This Leave Us?

The terrible reality of 2026 is that we cannot rely on governments or international bodies to spontaneously choose humanity over geopolitics. Accountability is not given; it has to be forced.  

When you ask when we will love again, the answer is that the love is already there, but it is trapped in the trenches. 

The people surviving these atrocities, and the people standing shoulder-to-shoulder with them, are carrying the entire weight of human conscience right now.

For those of us watching from the outside, our job is to refuse to look away, to refuse to let these crises become normalized background noise, and to direct our grief into tangible solidarity—supporting the mutual aid groups, backing the legal actions pushed by human rights advocates, and amplifying the voices of those on the ground.

It is okay to weep for the world, and it is okay to be furious.

That fury is just love refusing to surrender to apathy."

Image captured in the French ALpes in 2020 by me, Mirjana M. Ilic.