Maxine and Martin: What’s love got to do with it? Everything.

This was Rep. Maxine Waters speaking at a rally Saturday, in a now-infamous diatribe against Donald Trump:

The American people have put up with this president long enough. What more do we need to see? What more lies do we need to hear? If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them!

She later explained on TV:

For these members of his Cabinet who remain and try to defend him, they’re not going to be able to go to a restaurant, to be able to stop at a gas station, to be able to shop at a department store. The people are going to turn on them, they’re going to protest, they’re going to absolutely harass them until they tell the president: ‘No, I can’t hang with you.’

Contrast that with the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1957. 

He wrote about agape — love — and the power of nonviolence:

Agape is understanding, creative, redemptive good will for all men. Biblical theologians would say it is the love of God working in the minds of men. It is an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return. And when you come to love on this level you begin to love men not because they are likeable, not because they do things that attract us, but because God loves them and here we love the person who does the evil deed while hating the deed that the person does. It is the type of love that stands at the center of the movement that we are trying to carry on in the Southland—agape.

…God grant that as men and women all over the world struggle against evil systems they will struggle with love in their hearts, with understanding good will. Agape says you must go on with wise restraint and calm reasonableness but you must keep moving. We have a great opportunity in America to build here a great nation, a nation where all men live together as brothers and respect the dignity and worth of all human personality. We must keep moving toward that goal.

Our self-respect is at stake; the prestige of our nation is at stake. Civil rights is an eternal moral issue which may well determine the destiny of our civilization in the ideological struggle with communism.

Dr. King added some advice on how to protest:

We must keep moving with wise restraint and love and with proper discipline and dignity.  

Do we have any leaders on the national stage anymore who can speak with this kind of conviction about love? Do we have any who see it as a force for good? Do we have any who believe it?

Or are we reduced to trafficking in hate?

I have to wonder.