You answer anger with love. You answer anger with selflessness.

Host: The city was breathing heat, the kind that rose off the asphalt in shimmering waves. It was late afternoon, the sun hanging low and swollen — a bronze eye staring unblinking at a world too restless to rest.

The streets were loud — honking cars, shouting voices, the constant hum of exhaustion and impatience. The kind of day when tempers fray as easily as old thread.

On the corner of a small block café, the doorbell chimed as Jack stepped inside, shoulders tight, jaw set. His phone buzzed again — another argument, another unfinished text. He tossed it on the table like a challenge.

Jeeny sat across from him, a half-drunk iced coffee sweating on the wood between them. She studied his face for a moment — that quiet storm brewing just behind the eyes.

Jeeny: softly, reading from her notebook
“Anthony Ramos once said, ‘You answer anger with love. You answer anger with selflessness. The answer to anger is always the opposite thing of anger.’”

Jack: snorting, leaning back
“Sounds like something you’d read on a mug in a therapist’s waiting room.”

Jeeny: smiling faintly
“Maybe. But sometimes the truth needs to be simple so it can slip past the ego.”

Host: The café hummed softly, a half-empty sanctuary filled with clinking cups and the faint hiss of the espresso machine. Outside, the sunlight fell like broken gold through the window blinds.

Jack: running a hand through his hair, voice low
“I just don’t get it, Jeeny. How do you meet anger with love without being walked over? Without letting someone think it’s okay to treat you like garbage?”

Jeeny: leaning forward, her tone steady and compassionate
“You’re not excusing the anger. You’re disarming it. Love doesn’t mean surrender — it means refusing to become what hurt you.”

Jack: bitterly
“Easy to say. Harder when you’re the one being punched in the gut by words.”

Jeeny: nodding softly, eyes kind but firm
“I know. But every time you answer anger with more anger, you become part of its chain — link by link. Someone has to decide to stop it from reaching the next person.”

Host: The light shifted, spilling across their table, painting their faces in gold and shadow. There was tension there — not just in words, but in memory, in the things unsaid.

Jack: after a long silence, voice softer
“My father used to yell a lot. About everything. Work, bills, even the weather. I’d yell back sometimes — just to feel like I had power. But it always made the room colder. Like anger sucked the oxygen out of the air.”

Jeeny: quietly
“And love is the breath that brings it back.”

Jack: glancing at her, a faint smile tugging at his lips
“You really believe that?”

Jeeny: without hesitation
“I do. Love isn’t weakness, Jack. It’s resistance — the kind that doesn’t destroy, but transforms.”

Host: The sound of a spoon clinking in a cup punctuated the silence. Outside, a man yelled at a car that didn’t stop for him in the crosswalk. For a moment, the café seemed to exist in two worlds — the one inside, breathing calm, and the one outside, still burning.

Jack: softly, thinking aloud
“So if anger is fire… love is water?”

Jeeny: smiling faintly
“No. Love is light. Fire consumes; light reveals. Both burn — but one destroys, the other shows the way.”

Jack: nodding slowly, letting the words sink in
“I used to think love was passive. That it meant forgiving everything, even what shouldn’t be forgiven.”

Jeeny: gently
“No. Love isn’t permission. It’s presence. It’s the courage to stay human when the world wants you to harden.”

Host: The café door opened, a gust of wind sweeping through, rustling napkins and stirring the air with the faint smell of rain. The city had quieted, just a little — as if it, too, was listening.

Jack: after a pause, his voice almost a whisper
“So what do you do when you’re the angry one?”

Jeeny: smiling knowingly
“Then you love yourself enough to stop feeding it.”

Jack: quietly, almost to himself
“Love yourself enough… to stop feeding it.”

Jeeny: nodding
“Anger wants control. It wants to make the world smaller, tighter, meaner. But love opens it up again — and you along with it.”

Host: The rain began outside, slow and deliberate, the sound like quiet applause against the glass. Jack turned to the window, watching the streaks of water blur the world into watercolor.

Jack: softly, his voice tinged with new calm
“I think I’ve spent half my life learning how to fight — and not nearly enough time learning how to stay soft.”

Jeeny: smiling gently
“Staying soft isn’t easy. It’s an act of defiance in a world that mistakes cruelty for strength.”

Jack: meeting her eyes, a small, genuine smile forming
“Then maybe love’s the hardest rebellion there is.”

Jeeny: quietly, with a touch of warmth
“It is. Because it doesn’t demand victory — it just refuses to surrender its soul.”

Host: The café filled with the soft symphony of rain, cups clinking, low conversations threading through the air like melody. The tension between them had dissolved — not solved, but softened.

Outside, the man who’d been shouting earlier now stood under an awning, helping a woman pick up her dropped groceries. The scene passed quietly, unnoticed — but it mattered.

Jeeny: watching, almost to herself
“That’s how it begins — not in speeches, but in small choices. One person deciding not to throw back the fire.”

Jack: softly
“Answering anger with love.”

Jeeny: nodding
“And with selflessness. Not because it’s easy, but because it’s the only thing that actually changes anything.”

Host: The camera would linger on the window, the rain softening the city’s sharp edges, turning the chaos into reflection.

And in that stillness, Anthony Ramos’s words echoed — not as instruction, but as revelation:

That the cure for anger is not suppression, but transformation.
That love is not the opposite of power, but its purest form.
And that the bravest act a person can perform is to meet fury with grace, again and again, until the fire forgets how to burn.

Jeeny: softly, with a smile
“You can’t fight hate with hate, Jack. You just learn to shine brighter.”

Jack: leaning back, eyes on the rain
“Then maybe love’s not the answer — maybe it’s the question that keeps saving us.”

Host: The rain slowed, the world washed clean. Inside, two cups sat side by side — the coffee long gone, but the warmth still there.

And as the city exhaled, so did they —
their silence, for once, not made of tension, but of peace.

Because the answer to anger had already arrived — quietly, softly, completely — in the space they’d made by choosing love.