As Edwards and Post (2009, 7) put it: “Consider the volunteer
working in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina whose constant efforts, along
with those of countless others, can achieve only a very partial alleviation of immense
suffering. They inevitably begin to ask why is it that support and resources
are not available from the corridors of power, and what forces are responsible
for sup neglect. This example shows how justice is implicit in love, and
how justice-seeking is love’s modulation or expression. ‘Doing unto others’
does require the irreplaceable face-to-face interpersonal works of love, but it
also requires the courage to confront larger, Systemic unfairness… Love that
does not ‘descend’ into the struggle for justice is incomplete, if not
irrelevant.” It is the same phenomenon that workers from the Student Non-Violent
Co-ordinating Committee encountered in the Mississippi Delta four decades earlier,
and that so moved Gandhi 30 years before.