For the past month, the Love Revolution Bus Tour and Valarie Kaur have been energizing communities in 45 cities across the country with a simple but powerful method of community organizing. Valarie Kaur, a visionary Sikh mother, social justice activist and attorney, developed the concept of Revolutionary Love after documenting the wave of hate crimes targeting Muslim communities after 9/11. Do not mistake her definition of love as simply an emotion felt between people. The method of organizing includes a path to healing and empowerment through courageous actions, including sharing grief across traditional cultural boundaries.

Along the tour route, Valarie published regular updates that upend notions that we live in an impossibly divided society. She does not shy away from speaking truth to power — it seems that no matter how controversial, painful or messy the issue addresses them directly. The following was her dispatch on October 7, marking one year of the war in Gaza.

I am writing this from a bus. I have been traveling with musicians and activists across the U.S. to 45 cities on the Revolutionary Love Bus Tour. We are speaking with thousands of students, activists, healers, and families. And everywhere we go, I see us — we are all stretching our hearts to hold the enormity of grief:



We mourn the 1,100+ people slaughtered in Israel on Oct 7th. We ache for the safe return of the 101 hostages captured. We grieve the 42,000 people killed in Palestine in the genocidal violence since then, 16,765 of them children. We ache for the 10,000+ Palestinians missing. We have never seen children massacred on this scale, this efficiently, in our lifetime. It overwhelms the senses; it is hard to resist despair.



Here in the U.S., our calls for ceasefire & return of the hostages go unheard by our own government who funds the slaughter, hate crimes are the highest they have been on record, antisemitism and anti-Muslim violence soar, and student protesters are met with police brutality. All in an election year that weaponizes our fear and fatigue to drive us apart.

Here’s what I have learned on the road:



The warmongers, supremacists, terrorists, and demagogues want us to believe that we are helpless — that only those willing to kill civilians for their cause have power. But there are more of us than ever before. Every day I meet people like us — who grieve Palestinian and Israeli lives, who want Muslim and Jewish safety, who want an end to occupation and terror, who long for a future of co-existence — who see their children as our own. Millions of us. I believe that we together hold the antidote:

Revolutionary Love is the call of our times.

Our most urgent task is to alchemize our pain into energy and action. And the only way to do that is together. The labor is long. Let us fortify each other. Who will you breathe with today? Who will help you push?

The Revolutionary Love Tour visited sites including the fortified border wall in Nogales, Arizona, where they lifted up compassionate work of local activists. They performed music and offered speeches at the George Floyd Memorial in Minneapolis, and visited the Oak Creek site where the Sikh community survived a massacre. They grieved with mothers and offered a compass to navigate from the deepest pain imaginable into taking proactive action to build a better world.

On their website, anyone can access a useful tool to help activate and sustain effective peace building. We invite you to check out the Revolutionary Love Compass here.