When do you decide to speak up? How do you know what you should say? When do you decide that the time for words is past and you must take action? And how do you decide what you should do?
It's easy to be moral and brave in a hypothetical. We assume if we had lived during the revolutionary war, we would have spied for General Washington and passed information along with the laundry to the revolutionaries. Surely our houses would have been a part of the Underground Railroad. We would have built a false room to hide our Jewish, queer, or Romani neighbors during the Holocaust.
It's harder when it's real. When you overhear an argument and wonder if you should step in. When a new rule or policy is proposed and you wonder how it might affect your neighbors. When a few small steps make you wonder what is waiting at the end of this slippery slope.
For all our moralizing, we need to be honest and compassionate with yourself and with each other and admit that this is hard. Every day in every circumstance, knowing what is right and doing it is difficult. That's the plain honest truth. And I don't have the answers for what you or I should be doing. But that doesn't change our responsibility to what is right and to each other.
