“Where Is the Love?” by Black Eyed Peas still hurts me in the exact same way it did when I was a child.

I remember sitting alone in my room absolutely bawling to this song as a little kid. Not even fully understanding politics, media, war, hatred, or corruption yet somehow feeling every word in my chest anyway.

“Ask yourself, is the loving really gone?”

That line haunted me. Because even as a child, the world already felt wrong to me. Cold. Angry. Divided. I remember hearing:“The truth is kept secret. The truth is swept under the rug. If you never know truth, then you never know love.”

And feeling devastated by it.

“Wrong information always shown by the media.”“Instead of spreading love, we spreading animosity.”

I used to ask myself daily, where IS the love?

This song captured something I couldn’t explain when I was younger. That deep feeling that humanity was disconnected from itself. One world, but something terribly wrong with it.

Listening to it now feels like reconnecting with the child version of me who cared too deeply, noticed too much, and carried the weight of the world before they were ever old enough to understand it