The lunch line at the drive-thru inched forward. When we reached the window, the cashier leaned out and said, "your meal has already been paid for." I looked up startled, searching for the donor's car to thank them, but it had already slipped back into traffic. It was a small gesture, yet it carried a warmth that felt older than the moment itself; it also felt so deeply hopeful in a world that is slowly closing in.
Anthropologists have shown that in early hunter and foraging societies, spontaneous acts of care and sharing created trust networks that helped human groups survive and thrive in unpredictable conditions (see for example the works of Richard Lee, Sarah Hrdy, Kim Hill and A. Magdalena Hurtado). Sitting there with my meal, I felt a faint echo of that ancient past, how a simple act of care and generosity can momentarily bring strangers together, reminding us of the social instincts that have long helped humans face challenging times. A paid meal at a drive-thru became a subtle form of reconnection and resistance: a quiet reminder that humans have long relied on mutual care to endure uncertainty.
There is indeed something unexpectedly intimate about the several forms of quiet, non-violent resistance emerging in this moment of tightening authoritarianism and choleric politics creeping across the world. In addition to echoing an ancient pattern that was key for human survival and the unfolding of our potential, they also mirror the persistent insistence on love and life that Gabriel García Márquez captures in most of his writing and more specifically in his book, Love in the Time of Cholera. In the novel, love is not just a romantic, idyllic force; it is a patient one. It endures through decay, disease, and the slow violence of a world closing in. The backdrop of disease is not incidental, cholera is both literal and metaphorical: disease on the surface, personal and social unrest simmering underneath. In a society marked by disease, death and social control, tenderness becomes a political stance: a refusal to let the world harden you.
That same endurance against the grain of a world that grows harder echoes in the ways a lot of people are resisting today's authoritarian currents across the globe, which seek to thrive on fear, isolation, the demands on people to retreat to hardened identities, to distrust their neighbours and accept cruelty as "normal." In such a climate, even small, random gestures of connection become a quiet and steady refusal to give up on one another. It is the kind of resistance that survives because it is powered by life insisting on itself. Just as Márquez's characters find ways to live and love within and against the constrains of cholera, a lot of people now are finding ways to resist within and against the constrains of choleric politics. The crisis shapes the landscape, but it does not decide the outcome. They refuse to let crisis define what is possible; they keep showing up, they keep caring, they keep imagining alternatives even when some insist none exist; they choose imagination, vulnerability, presence, tenderness, generosity and a willingness to believe and work towards hopeful futures that cannot yet be seen. Through unscripted acts of love they unsettle hostility and oppression. And when love suddenly appears when hostility or indifference is expected, it shifts the emotional and social terrain reminding us that even in moments of profound social and political distress, most people continue to choose one another; they continue to build, to care, to resist. They continue, in other words, to love.
Random acts of love and care are not trivial gestures. They are ancient, meaningful practices that have long helped us maintain social cohesion in moments of collective crisis, reminding us of our shared humanity and the importance of paying it forward to keep love circulating in a world that is increasingly trying to harden us.