Week 16 Reflection

In today’s class, we spoke about bell hooks’ piece titled, “Love as the Practice of Freedom,” where she explains her theory of cultivating an ethic of love in our society. She explains that she means this more as a political measure in that she believes politicians and others need to first consider love before trying to work on any other issues and letting this ethic of love influence how they conduct themselves and make political decisions. Keywords from this week include climate grief, displacement, and solastagia.

While I think there is validity in what bell hooks is explaining in “Love as the Practice of Freedom,” I also think it leaves a lot of questions and things to consider. Firstly, I believe that there are many American politicians (certainly not ALL) who personally believe that their actions and decisions are from a place of love, even though not everyone may agree with them, especially when this disconnect could be due to a difference in belief systems or ideals. I’d be interested to know more about how this should be handled.  In class today, we also spoke about the theory that structural inequalities lead to mental illness, which I think is a very narrowly focused way to think about either of these things, particularly mental health since mental illnesses would undoubtedly still exist in the event that we were able to fix all structural inequality. I think more conversations about mental health are really important for our overall society where mental illness is very real and hurts many more people than we even realize.