When Did the Love Leave Your Heart?

When?

When did the love leave your heart?

Was it ever there?

When did you become indifferent, or worse, a spectator to the pain and suffering of other people? At what point did you decide that your wealth, your needs, your safety and security were so sacred that whatever happens to your neighbors in your city, your state, your country, or any human being, for that matter, was simply not your concern?

When did you develop hatred in your heart for people just because they live across a border, speak another language, practice another religion, eat different foods, wear different clothes, salute a different flag?

Why do you have so much scorn for someone seeking a better life by fleeing a place where their opportunities were stunted, where the rules are rigged, where violence is normal, where the future feels so stifling that you can’t breathe?

What made you think the opportunities you had entitled you to possess a cold heart?

I’m not asking this as some smug, self-righteous “gotcha.” I’m asking it because I don’t understand how so many people got here. How we got here as a society. How it became normal to speak about human beings like they’re an infestation. How it became acceptable to look at suffering and blame the victim.

Because here’s what I know: people aren’t born like this. Kids don’t come out of the womb thinking, I hope strangers suffer as long as I don’t have to pay for it. That’s learned. It's indoctrination. That’s cultivated like a hard callus, built over time, one rationalization at a time. One podcast. One “migrant caravan” panic. One meme. One Fox News chyron. One politician pointing at a scapegoat while picking your pocket.

So I’m asking again: when?

When did you first look at this world and decide that not everyone is entitled to basic health care, clean water, a roof over their head, education, nutrition, and safety? Who the fuck do you think you are that entitles you to so much more?

What is it about the people who can’t afford those things on their own, whether due to circumstance, illness, bad luck, the zip code they were born into, or the trauma they carry, that makes you say “not on my dime,” as if you haven’t benefitted from systems designed to support the common good?

Were the “socialist” organizations of the police, public schools, fire departments, road maintenance, public libraries, parks, water systems, building codes, food safety regulations, disaster relief, and public health infrastructure not there for you your entire life?

Do you think you built your life in a vacuum? That you are some lone wolf hero who hacked reality through grit alone? Time to get over yourself.

No one is self-made. That’s a bedtime story we tell ourselves so we can sleep at night. Every person who’s ever said “I earned everything I have” is standing on a mountain of invisible scaffolding: teachers, hospitals, roads, power lines, public safety, sanitation, commerce, law, stability. The only difference between people is how aware they are of the scaffolding and how grateful they choose to be.

And still, somewhere along the way, gratitude curdled into entitlement.

Somewhere along the way, “I’m fortunate” became “I deserve this more than you.”

Somewhere along the way, “How can we help?” became “How do we keep them out?”

And in the Trump era, the fuckery is supercharged and weaponized. A whole movement built on turning politics into identity, and identity into grievance. “Build the wall” chanted like a hymn. “Send them back” shouted like it’s normal. Families separated at the border treated like policy footnotes. Muslims turned into a threat by default. Refugees reduced to a talking point. All of it sold as “strength,” as if cruelty is proof of backbone.

When is enough, enough?

Capitalism, as we practice it, is not some noble meritocracy. It’s a game. It rewards the people who figure out the system, the people who inherit a head start, the people who are well-connected, and yes, sometimes, the people who work harder and take bigger risks. But let’s not pretend the hardest working people are the most rewarded. In this upside-down system, the people doing the most essential work, the work that actually keeps the world functioning, often get paid the least.

The caregiver. The farmworker. The day laborer. The dishwasher. The home health aide. The teacher. The bus driver. The people who clean the bathrooms you use. The people who stock the shelves. The people who carry the weight so everyone else can pretend they live above the mess. Why do you think you're better than them?

A staggering amount of wealth is inherited, and we're not talking just billionaires. So many people start with a leg up, whether it's a nest egg, trust fund, or even just inheriting a stable upbringing. These are advantages. For the people who “make it,” a rare few hit a rocket ship of timing, market conditions, access, and luck, and then spend the rest of their lives telling themselves it was primarily virtue.

And once you believe that myth, it becomes very convenient to believe its sequel: if you’re struggling, it’s because you’re defective.

That’s the lie that allows comfort to coexist with cruelty. That’s the lie that makes it possible to walk past someone on the sidewalk and feel nothing. Or worse, feel irritation.

That’s the lie that turns empathy into weakness and generosity into "woke" or soft.

And it’s also how people get talked into voting against their own issues.

This is the part that breaks my brain. People who need affordable health care cheering for the politicians trying to gut it. People who are one medical emergency away from bankruptcy yelling about “handouts.” People working two jobs, drowning in rent, convinced that the real enemy is an immigrant family looking for safety, not the corporations and billionaires squeezing the system until it squeals.

That doesn’t happen by accident. That’s propaganda. That’s brainwashing. That’s years of being fed a steady diet of fear and resentment until you can’t tell who is actually hurting you. You get pointed at the poor, the foreign, the queer, the “woke,” the “urban,” the “coastal,” the “illegal,” the “other.” And while you’re busy hating the decoy, the people with actual power keep picking the meat off the bone.

Conservatism represents a principle of restriction. That’s not an insult; it’s the core idea. Conserve resources. Restrict spending. Limit public obligations. Smaller government. Lower taxes. Fewer commitments to the collective.

In its best form, it’s a caution. A reminder that systems can be inefficient, that power can be abused, that bureaucracy can become self-serving. Fine. There’s truth in that.

But what it has become, what it so often sounds like now, is a moral worldview built around guarding one’s own comfort at all costs. A worldview where “freedom” means freedom from responsibility to anyone outside your tribe. A worldview where “personal responsibility” is something you demand from the poor while excusing the rich for every advantage they’ve ever been handed. A worldview that screams about “socialism” while cashing the checks from the very public systems it depends on.

But here’s the part about which I want to be very clear: when that restriction turns into reflexive opposition to helping people, when it becomes a philosophy of “I got mine” dressed up as political identity, then you are fucking selfish. It’s not principled. It’s not brave. It’s not “realistic.” It’s selfish.

Liberalism represents a broader view of humanity. A recognition that we are all trapped on the same spinning rock. That none of us chose to be born, chose our parents, chose our genes, chose our childhood, chose our starting line.

Being liberal literally means being generous. Kind. Empathic. It means believing that human dignity shouldn’t be conditional on your bank balance. It means believing that there are baseline rights we should be able to agree on because we are human: food, shelter, health care, education, safety.

It means believing that if a society is wealthy enough to produce billionaires, it’s wealthy enough to keep kids from going hungry, to keep families from going bankrupt because someone got cancer, to keep people from dying because a medication is priced like a luxury handbag.

Liberals believe there are more than enough resources to provide basic stability for every human being, if people contribute their fair share, if institutions are structured for the common good, if the purpose of the system is something more than extracting maximum profit from minimum humanity.

And that’s where the conversation usually halts, because the minute you say “fair share,” you hit the conservative nerve.

Some people simply don’t want fairness. They want hierarchy. They want scarcity. They want to believe they are winning not because they are fortunate, but because they are better.

And once you’ve built your identity around “I’m better,” compassion becomes threatening. Because compassion implies equality. Compassion suggests that the person you look down on is not beneath you. They’re you, in a different set of circumstances.

So again: when did you become so afraid of that truth that you started calling empathy a weakness?

When did you start treating the idea of helping others as if it’s soft?

When did you start measuring human worth like it’s a credit score?

When did you decide that suffering is a necessary feature of the system instead of a problem to solve?

Because let’s not pretend this is abstract. This shows up in real life, every day. It shows up when people scoff at someone who’s unhoused, as if that person is a lesser human being. It shows up when we talk about immigrants as criminals by default, instead of human beings doing what humans have always done: moving toward opportunity, away from danger.

It shows up when we dismiss the sick as burdens. It shows up when we tell struggling families to “work harder” while ignoring stagnant wages, rising rents, predatory health care costs, and the fact that “hard work” doesn’t mean much if the ladder has missing rungs.

And it shows up when we pretend cruelty is “just being honest.” When we rebrand callousness as “common sense.” When we say “tough love” but what we really mean is “I don’t want to feel responsible.”

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: we are responsible.

Not for everything. Not for everyone. Not in some guilt-ridden, performative way where you have to prove your goodness on the internet. But we are responsible in a basic human way.

Because if you benefit from a society, if you use its roads, its safety, its stability, its infrastructure, its labor, then you are part of the deal. You don’t get to take everything and contribute nothing. You don’t get to be held up by the collective and then spit on the idea of the collective.

You don’t get to call yourself moral while advocating for a world where only the strong survive, when you had help, visible or invisible, every step of the way.

I’m not asking to agree with every policy. I’m not asking to surrender your discernment. I’m not asking to ignore the complexity. I’m asking to remember you’re a human being. To look at another human being and feel something other than contempt. To see suffering and feel a flicker of responsibility, not because you’re a saint, but because you’re alive.

And if you can’t do that, if you’ve convinced yourself that empathy is weakness, that helping people is being “played,” that compassion is a scam, then you need to be honest about what you’ve chosen to become.

That’s not strength.

That’s not wisdom.

That’s not realism.

That’s fear.

Fear dressed as ideology.

Fear that if you acknowledge someone else’s humanity, you might have to adjust how you live. Fear that if you accept that luck plays a role, your pride might take a hit. Fear that if you admit you didn’t do it alone, your identity might crack.

So one last time:

When did the love leave your heart?

And if it did, do you want it back?