A good friend wrote to me, lamenting that “People often say that the only thing that is needed for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing, but I’m more and more convinced that good men doing something are just going to get themselves killed by an angry mob.”
And I felt that. I’ve been feeling something akin to that for a long time now. But in Minneapolis, right now, ordinary people—not activists, not protesters, just people—are standing outside schools in subzero temperatures watching for ICE vehicles so parents can pick up their kids safely. Neighbors are doing daycare patrol in windchills of 25 below. A thousand people are on group chats tracking federal agents so they can blow the whistles coffee shops are handing out to warn their neighbors. A hundred clergy got arrested at the airport for singing hymns. A public health nurse is standing between immigrants and federal agents as a literal human shield—not because she thinks she’ll fix the world, but because her neighbor needed a body between them and the government.
And it’s working. Trump ordered DHS to pull back. The operation is scaling down. The commander got replaced. Not because someone gave a great speech or won an argument online. Because thousands of ordinary people decided their neighbors mattered more than their comfort, and showed up, and kept showing up, in the cold, every day.
Good men (and women) doing something isn’t futile. It’s just quieter than the evil, and harder to see from a distance.
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The Annex 
“Good [people] doing something isn’t futile. It’s just quieter than the evil” Doing something also usually requires sustained effort in ways that are effective instead of flashy. Quieter may also stretch out far longer than the evil act that is readily apparent.
It is far easier to give one speech than to organize the neighbors to take shifts for pickup. It is much scarier to be the first person on the line that matters when the outcome is less certain than a jail cell that is restraining with the embarrassment of an open toilet yet otherwise safe.
It is far easier to be the firebrand getting arrested for civil disobedience than to be the last good person in the rooms that matters having non-public words with the people who make decisions. How can you work for/with them? Sometimes, that’s the harder path to keep trying (every day trying) than to do the principled quit and remove oneself from the room. Sometimes, the principled quit is indeed the correct thing to do because a specific individual needs to preserve themself or isn’t the effective voice in the moments that stretch for weeks/months.
There are no easy answers once we’re at the point that the good people have to do more than just go about their daily lives being good.
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