The Importance of Speaking Up

      While people talk about all the forms of resistance we should engage in, most of these are very specific acts outside our everyday lives—joining groups like Indivisible, showing up at protests, writing or calling politicians, donating, voting. They matter.

This is an excerpt from Rebecca Solnit’s Meditations in an Emergency newsletter

      But a really significant part of the work is just speaking up, and not just in public—letting people know where you stand, talking about what matters, speaking with accuracy, clarity and conviction about the situations we face, standing on principle, encouraging people to know that we have power and can use it, refusing to be swayed by those posturing defeatists who pretend that there's nothing we can do and the outcome has already been decided. And yeah, signs, buttons, t-shirts, and stickers can do some of this work too.

      That's not a case for having arguments with people you disagree with (partly because the essence of arguments is that you can change the mind of the other person or prove them wrong, and that's something some people are good at—I'm not—but the real work is mostly to inform and reinforce those who are on our side, or to let those who are not see your conviction and maybe hear your facts and sit with that, not fight you over it).

      Because a lot of what matters is intangible: it's how informed and how engaged the public is, and both those things are fed by conversations, by the contagiousness of courage, by the facts that remind people of the reality of the situation, including the reality that sometimes we win when we show up. Public opinion, public resolve is made up of countless individual opinions shaped by countless individual influences. Be one of them.

      We are supposed to believe that the troops sent to Coast Guard Island [in the San Francisco Bay area] stood down because wealthy and powerful men talked to the president on the phone. But I think the immediate, well-organized and fierce opposition may have played a role, and if it did of course they'll never acknowledge it. They never do, because convincing themselves and us that we have no such power is essential to their worldview, and their power.

      In the bigger picture, the solidarity we're seeing with immigrants is a beautiful thing, born of empathy and indignation—and a reminder of our power, because it is genuinely working, directly in some situations, and by informing politicians and the public that this will not go down without opposition, and reminding the people who are targeted that some of us care.

      I did not know on Jan. 20 how people would show up, and what they'd show up for, but of all the issues it could have been, immigration is in many ways the most powerful, the most profound, the most moving—solidarity across national and racial lines, a broad human rights campaign, and a recognition of the inherent rights and dignity of every refugee and immigrant above and beyond their crucial role in the economy that may make the USA a better, more united country in the long run.