Talk is Cheap
A Quiet Quaker protest
Mike lives in Minnesota.
I’ve known him for almost 30 years. I like to see him show up in the group chat, even though he’s most likely sending an A.I. slop video he made or soliciting us about yet another crypto scheme.
Lately, as you might imagine, his messages have changed:
(It hasn’t)
(He didn’t find any, fortunately, for his sake)
As usual when it comes to Mike’s suggestions, I did the opposite. I got quiet.
Katie and I have been attending the Friends Meeting at Cambridge (Quakers) for a couple of years now. On Saturday, we joined about 30 other folks from other area meetings for an hourlong vigil/silent worship on Cambridge Common.
I’ve been writing something I may or may not publish later about my experience of Quaker worship — which this both was and wasn’t like.
For one thing, it was gray and cold — comfortably cold, mid-30s — and it flurried for the briefest of moments. For another, we were standing the whole time.
I watched a crane over on Harvard’s campus swing back and forth (working on a Saturday?!) I tried to smile and make eye contact with everyone passing through — students, visitors, a couple of people in Houston Texans gear in town for the next day’s playoff game. I amused myself by thinking about how 25 years after my dad and I wandered through on our first visit to Massachusetts, I was now part of the tourist’s backdrop (“What do they do in Cambridge?” “Well some of them stand out silently in the park on Saturday afternoons.”)
Two vigil participants did speak, but I couldn’t really hear them, and saying things wasn’t the purpose. What is there to say?
ICE agents murdered a woman; they flash-banged a baby; they may well be pepper-spraying someone as you read this. They’re violating many of the founding precepts of a country they purport to love.
Other than holding up a sign so good it finally causes that Massive Aneurysm We’ve All Been Waiting For (you know the one), a silent protest seems to me as effective in its way as a loud one.
Or maybe I’m just telling myself that because I’m not sure what else to do, and this was the protest at hand.
It was quiet, but not invisible. And it’s better than nothing.
The way silent presence can cut throgh noise is underrated. Sometimes bearing witness without demanding attention says more than shouting. I did something similar in college once, just stood outside a hall for hours, and it was surprising how many people stopped to ask.
I read a little recently about “political fatigue” — this environment is so extreme and relentless that it wears us down and puts us at a loss of what to do, so we do nothing. Injustice thrives in inaction. Any action is powerful because it is not inaction