How does one hate a country, or love one? ... I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply?

Ursula K LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness

There is an impulse in moments like this to appeal to self-interest. To say: These horrors you are allowing to happen, they will come to your doorstep one day; to repeat the famous phrase about who they came for first and who they'll come for next. But this appeal cannot, in matter of fact, work. If the people well served by a system that condones such butchery ever truly believed the same butchery could one day be inflicted on them, they'd tear the system down tomorrow. And anyway, by the time such a thing happens, the rest of us will already be dead.

No, there is no terrible thing coming for you in some distant future, but know that a terrible thing is happening to you now. You are being asked to kill off a part of you that would otherwise scream in opposition to injustice. You are being asked to dismantle the machinery of a functioning conscience. Who cares if diplomatic expediency prefers you shrug away the sight of dismembered children? Who cares if great distance from the bloodstained middle allows obliviousness. Forget pity, forget even the dead if you must, but at least fight against the theft of your soul.

--Omar el Akkad

The real damage is done by those millions who want to 'survive.' The honest men who just want to be left in peace. Those who don't want their little lives disturbed by anything bigger than themselves. Those with no sides and no causes. Those who won't take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness. Those who don't like to make waves - or enemies. Those for whom freedom, honor, truth, and principles are only literature. Those who live small, mate small, die small. It's the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you'll keep it under control. If you don't make any noise, the monsters won't find you. 

 But it's all an illusion, because they die too, these people who roll up their spirits into little tiny balls to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn.

Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just don't dare express themselves as we did. 

How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause... It is such a splendid sunny day, and I have to go. But how many have to die on the battlefield in these days, how many young, promising lives. What does my death matter if by our acts thousands are warned and alerted. 

--Sophie Scholl, executed 22 February 1943

“Nice people made the best Nazis. My mom grew up next to them. They got along, refused to make waves, looked the other way when things got ugly and focused on happier things than “politics.” They were lovely people who turned their heads as their neighbors were dragged away. You know who weren’t nice people? Resisters.”

― Naomi Shulman

In a time of hate  

Love is an act of resistance  

In a time of fear  

Faith is an act of resistance  

In a time of misinformation  

Education is an act of resistance  

In a time of poor leadership  

Community is an act of resistance  

In a time like this  

Joy is an act of resistance  

Resist. Resist. Resist. 

–Loryn Brantz

Authoritarians cannot rise if there are strong communities. and if people are acting with joy. That is, you need despair and anger for an authoritarian to rise. Whatever those things are that you bring to the community - do them and do them with joy. And don't stop doing the things you love because you are scared, because that actually is a form of resistance. Showing up and doing things that you love says to an authoritarian: 'You have no place to root here.' " 

--Heather Cox Richardson

 Right now all movements for love, care, material well-being, diversity, this earth, and humans having a future on this earth need to remember that we need each other. We must remember that there are organized forces working to disorganize and confuse us, turn us against each other and diffuse our power. We are not immune to the chaos of the world, but we can choose to be a grounding force together.

–Adrienne Maree Brown

 Josie George: “You can’t expect anyone to save a world they’re not in love with.”

“Go to where suffering is aligned with your capacity to meet it. You don’t have to go to death row or live in a monastery. You don’t have to sit with the unsheltered if that’s not your work. Go to where you can care safely and deeply and broaden that capacity over time.” Roshi Joan Halifax

Light

I want to write of the light

but I do not know

whether words can illuminate

the way it hangs

upon branches and bird wings

and broken things

returning beings to beauty.

Can words spin substance

from sunshine and decay?

Can words cajole

celebration from night-weary

birds?

Can words warm surfaces

of stones and sorrows?

Can words reveal richness

in mundane

and battered

things?

I do not know.

But if we would write

a tomorrow

which is wider than wounds

we have worn,

we might wield words

like benedictions

and remember

blessings

within brokenness,

beginnings

within endings,

and beauty

within all things.

-- Bernadette Miller

Dear Stranger,

1. 

There was never not a bridge 

from your chest to mine. 

My heartbeat was always 

the sound of your feet walking towards me. 

I can’t believe how many years 

I lived without knowing 

the air you were breathing out, 

was the air I was breathing in. 

Forgive me for not saying ‘thank you’

before our lungs had reason to hide.

2.

Fear is what you make it 

and I’ve been trying to make it my teacher. 

When the lesson starts to break me

I remember the dogs in the shelters-- 

how even those we call ‘the mean ones’

will follow their fear to each other’s sides 

in the middle of the night,

make pillows of each other’s chests 

when they think no home is coming.

Almost everyone in the world

is softer than they look.

3.

Do you pray now more than you used to? 

I pray all of the time. I pray to The Big Bang 

and to The Tiny Bang and to The Bangs 

we’ll all have to cut ourselves so we can see 

what beauty can only be seen from 6 feet away.

4. 

Last night, a poet whose writing I love said he hasn’t written 

a single poem since the beginning of the quarantine.

He said every time he’s inclined to 

              he calls someone he loves instead.

5.

The first thing I learned from this virus 

was to question everything wanting to go viral.

The second thing I learned was to dream 

only giant dreams.

6.

A giraffe’s neck is 6 feet long. 

A decade from now will I remember the week

I spent wondering if I could hug a giraffe’s torso 

and not get sick if the giraffe coughed?

I don’t want to forget anything about this. 

Especially not how it feels to worry 

about everyone I love at the same time. 

So much of the world had been doing that already.

7.

If every heart-worthy novelist weeps for days 

before killing a beloved character off, 

how many centuries must god have spent sobbing 

before pressing a pen to the page of this year?

8.

I used to be a gardener in New Orleans. 

Every evening I’d spend almost an hour 

cleaning the earth out of my nails. 

She held on so tight. I loved her more for it.

Later I moved to the desert and was sitting

beside a cactus in my living room

when I heard a hurricane named Katrina 

was about to hit my former home. 

'Save the flowers', I said out loud, 

watching a storm cloud rage its hungry spiral 

across the television screen. 'Save the flowers', I said, 

having no idea we wouldn’t save the people.

9.

When the water left the city I went back,

drove through the 9th Ward to a church

that had been gutted by the storm.

The preacher had spray-painted his phone number 

across the length of the falling building.

There was something about his phone number

being as tall as the door––I couldn’t stop crying.

The world falls apart and people 

become foundation.

--Andrea Gibson

In the 1970s, Pete Seeger was invited to sing in Barcelona, Spain. Francisco Franco's fascist government, the last of the dictatorships that started World War II, was still in power but declining. A pro-democracy movement was gaining strength and to prove it, they invited America's best-known freedom singer to Spain. More that a hundred thousand people were in the stadium, where rock bands had played all day. But the crowd had come for Seeger. 

As Pete prepared to go on, government officials handed him a list of songs he was not allowed to sing. Pete studied it mournfully, saying it looked an awful lot like his set list. But they insisted: he must not sing any of these songs. 

Pete took the government's list of banned songs and strolled on stage. He held up the paper and said, “I've been told that I'm not allowed to sing these songs.” He grinned at the crowd and said, “So I'll just play the chords; maybe you know the words. They didn't say anything about *you* singing them.” 

He strummed his banjo to one song after another, and they all sang. A hundred thousand defiant freedom singers breaking the law with Pete Seeger, filling the stadium with words their government did not want them to hear, words they all knew and had sung together, in secret circles, for years. 

What could the government do? Arrest a hundred thousand singers? It had been beaten by a few banjo chords and the fame of a man whose songs were on the lips of the whole world. 

-- Richard Chamberlain