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Kareem’s Daily Quote
“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.” Elie Wiesel (1928–2016)
Nobel Prize-winning author and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, 1983. Credit: Andrea Blanch, Getty Images
Silence is never neutral. Choosing to keep your mouth shut is still a choice, and that choice always lands somewhere. Elie Wiesel understood that better than anyone. He didn’t use “if” or “maybe.” His words were deliberate and, honestly, uncomfortable. He didn’t say you should protest when it’s easy or when you’re sure it’ll work. He said you should always speak up.
That’s a heavy thing to live by. Most of us are experts at the kind of “quiet math” Wiesel hated—the mental cost/benefit analysis we do before we decide to open our mouths.
We ask ourselves: Is this going to cost me? Is anyone even listening? Does it actually matter? Those are fair questions. I’ve asked them myself in rooms where the stakes weren’t just some abstract idea, where you could actually feel the weight of being seen and the risk of speaking out. I still remember marching on campus after Dr. King was assassinated. People would stop me and say, “You’re going to the NBA, what are you out here protesting for?” The subtext was loud and clear: your success should be enough to buy your silence. I never bought into that bargain, but that doesn’t mean the tension ever goes away. You just learn to live with it and speak up anyway.
Wiesel’s real insight, the part that really stings, is the line he draws between power and duty. We usually treat them as the same thing, thinking it only matters to speak up if we’re 100% sure we can stop the injustice. That’s how we let ourselves off the hook. We tell ourselves the problem is just too big, or our voice is too small, or that protesting doesn’t really work, or that someone else will handle it. This last is the “bystander effect” where the crowd becomes our alibi.
But history has a way of calling our bluff. Look at Sophie and Hans Scholl. They handed out leaflets against the Nazis knowing they’d probably get caught, and they were executed just a few days later. They didn’t stop the war, but today, hundreds of schools in Germany are named after them. Or Frederick Douglass, standing in front of hostile crowds in the 1850s demanding that the nation’s conscience be “roused” long before anyone thought abolition was actually possible. These protests weren’t “effective” in the moment by any normal standard. But the fact that they stood up and went on the record? That was the whole enchilada. Sophie and Hans were two weights, bending that ancient arc towards justice.
After decades of watching, marching, and writing, it’s clear to me that a culture of apathy starts with personal silence. You can’t have a culture that stands up for what’s right if everyone is privately refusing to say a word. Lately, we’ve gotten really good at the performance of being mad: the retweets, the quick posts, the 24-hour outrage, but there’s often no depth behind it. Wiesel would have seen right through that. He spent his whole life trying to remind us that “witnessing” something is a lot different than just watching it happen.
The call to protest is deeper than just looking good or keeping a moral scorecard. It’s about refusing to let another person stand alone in their suffering. That’s the hard part. When you strip away the excuses, the crowd, and all the noise, you’re left with just one question, and it never gets any easier to answer:
What are you going to do?
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