To hate requires so little; to love requires doing what may feel impossible, because it means to lay down the sword and stretch out your hands, your arms, your hearts, to each other. Many will also criticize us, saying that love is too simplistic, that the problem between North Korea and the United States is too ideologically and geopolitically complicated. Those people fail to imagine with their hearts. Dr. King said: “We are inevitably our brother’s keeper because we are our brother’s brother. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.” And Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, another prophetic American voice of love, asked us, “How many disasters do we have to go through in order to realize that all of humanity has a stake in the liberty of one person; whenever one person is offended, we are all hurt.”

That kind of love refuses to hate, it refuses to believe that we are “enemies” by birth. We are brothers and sisters born of a common humanity. We believe in a love that remembers the humanity that binds us together, that opens us to hear the other’s voice, the other’s mourning. Then again, perhaps Baldwin was correct, “There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.” Yet we believe that reciprocal love can take us to that place together and heal our wounds.

David Kyuman Kim: These feel like especially loveless times. We write from the conviction that the values of a love-driven politics can transform how we engage each other not only as nations but also as human beings. Which is to say, a love-driven politics insists that we seek compassion, generosity, kindness, forgiveness and mercy for each other as much as we do for ourselves.

Our president was elected to represent our people, but he has not represented the best of us. He has instead chosen to display only our basest traits. While he is not the first president to speak and act with hubris and arrogance, he has chosen belligerence over diplomacy, bullying over accord, insult over care. He represents a strand and strain of the American experiment that stubbornly holds on to the misguided notion that we are a nation of destiny and superiority, strengthened on legacies of white supremacy and rapacious capitalism. He has exacted those misguided ideals by treating you with disrespect and disregard, all the while belittling you as a leader of your own people, and you, in turn have done the same.

As a Korean-American, I have to acknowledge you both as one of my people and very much not of my people. My mother’s family is from North Korea, and so in some very real ways, you and I are of common stock. But a land does not make for family. If anything, you and your father have shown how land and nation can destroy families and traumatize them for generations. You are the leader of a nation whose people have suffered at the service of a political vision. At what cost has your loyalty to power come to your people, let alone to your humanity?

My mother’s family fled North Korea because of the forces of war that are all too similar to the enmities that are threatening us today. And it was the consequences of the Korean War and the havoc it wreaked on my people in South Korea that eventually drove my family to the United States. And through this migration and growing up in white-supremacist America, I was transformed from our common stock to a Korean-American dedicated to the ways of love.