The Quiet Ones

When staying home becomes impossible

Ten days after total right hip arthroplasty

Miep Gies was a secretary. That’s what people forget. She wasn’t trained for resistance. She had no particular ideology, no history of activism. She was a woman who typed letters and answered phones, and one day, she looked at a family who needed to be hidden, and she hid them.

George Orwell understood something about this. He wrote about the proles—the ordinary masses who held the only hope for real change but didn’t recognize their own power. He wrote it as tragedy, because he believed they never would. He died before he could see what happens when they do.

There is a moment, in any uprising, when ordinary people cross a threshold they cannot uncross. It looks like a grandmother who has never held a sign, holding one. It looks like a retired veteran standing in the cold because he cannot sit at home. It looks like a woman showing up on a walker ten days after surgery, because staying away has become impossible.

I was at a vigil in Memphis on Sunday. I could stand for perhaps twenty minutes before the nerve in my hip would send electricity down my leg. The parking lot was uneven; I spent most of my time looking at the ground. I had thought I would be embarrassed to be seen this way, unsteady, slow, dependent on a metal frame to stay upright. Instead, I understood that the walker was the point. I was there with whatever body I had. That was the only credential required.

Around me: legal observers in purple vests, faces covered. A makeshift memorial bearing names, not only Renee Nicole Good, shot three times in the face for the crime of witnessing, but others. Candles for six other people. Drums and whistles and signs reading “Ice Out for Good.” And everywhere, the faces of people who had never called themselves activists, who had simply arrived at a line they would not cross.

My friend Sandy, in a purple vest, whispered that they would march to the elementary school. If enough came, they would take the streets. She asked me to pray.

I went home. I climbed into bed, put ice on my hip, and found the livestream.

What I watched: Tennessee Highway Patrol, dozens of vehicles, sirens screaming, descending on the peaceful march from both directions. A car grazed an observer; he fell. A woman stood with her arms out to stop them—when they passed, she knocked on the window. They dragged her out, shoved her into a cruiser. The crowd pressed in, shouting. It felt like the moment before an explosion.

And then the cars reversed. The patrol retreated.

I have thought about that retreat all day because it revealed something about the nature of the power arrayed against us. Even though the woman was still in custody, the community was still under siege, and the fear was still thick in the air.

Orwell wrote about a boot stamping on a human face forever. But the boot depends on our isolation, our exhaustion, our amnesia. It cannot stamp on a face that is surrounded by other faces, all of them watching, all of them refusing to look away. The power that came screaming down the street with its sirens and lights is brittle. It can arrest. It can intimidate. It can kill. What it cannot do is sustain itself against the simple, implacable presence of people who have decided that looking away is no longer an option.

The quiet ones are waking. They look like your neighbor, your coworker, the grandfather at the grocery store. They look like a woman on a walker who shouldn’t have been there but was.

This is how it always begins. With the ordinary—people who, like Miep, simply looked at what was in front of them and could not pretend they hadn’t seen.

The regime’s power is real. But it is thin. And the quiet ones are no longer quiet.