Sand in the Gears

I’ve spent a lot of time in cars this past year. Weaned from my keyboard, I settle for posts and comments on social media. Mainly Facebook, though I’m building community at Bluesky.

All too often, just as I finish a carefully typed post, it vanishes. Jack’s heard hundreds of miles of cussing through Oregon and Washington as my labor vanishes in a screen flicker. Sometimes I begin again. Often I just move on.

If I think my voice matters — and I wouldn’t be writing if I didn’t hope it does — then this amounts to a grinding drag on my productivity. I have to push against the friction to be heard. It takes longer, and I do less.

Jay Kuo taught me to always put the links in the comments to avoid downranking. If I write commentary with a link I shared, your share loses my words. I learned to include a picture, and then the link is just a link. If I talk about certain topics, I seem to reach fewer people, but perhaps you just interact less.

Together, this long list of tiny obstacles — sand in my gears — slows me down. I tell myself it isn’t purposeful.

It’s a term you’ve likely heard in the context of resisting fascism, but maybe you haven’t considered just how mundane resistance really is. We have a Hollywood idea of resistance: daring heroism, often coupled with tragic death. The White Rose was a college resistance group in Nazi Germany. Their beautiful young leaders were executed after hasty mock trials. To this day we repeat Sophie Scholl’s final words:

How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause... It is such a splendid sunny day, and I have to go. - Sophie Scholl

The quote above is actually from a letter her cellmate later composed recollecting their conversations during imprisonment. It may be her authentic words, or perhaps it was the beginning of a larger legend.

The crime Sophie was executed for was simple: she distributed pamphlets denouncing the Nazi government to college students. It was the fifth pamphlet the White Rose had left in hallways during classes, for students to find later, and they hadn’t distributed everything they had printed. Printing was valuable in those days, and Sophie didn’t want to see the remaining pamphlets wasted, so as the bell rang she tossed them from a balcony to flutter down.

A janitor saw her. It was as mundane as that.

This is a pamphlet.

Today the pamphlets of the White Rose are online, where anyone can read them. The sixth, worth three young idealists’ lives, runs to 800 words of call to action. Don’t normalize the party! Take action! Do something, they urge.

When I write, it feels like not nearly enough. Here I am, at my keyboard with warm coffee and slippers, kiting out missives. But when the Nazis executed Sophie Scholl, they showed it does matter. They insisted that even the smallest act — a student flinging 800-word pamphlets over a railing — is an existential threat to their power.

Her action is both heroic, and mundane. I’ve written more incendiary things and felt silly for bothering. Her heroism was not in the details of her actions: distributing a few thousand copies of someone else’s writing. Her heroism was in doing it when the penalty for dissent was death. I think many of us are seeing our potential actions through the eyes of people used to guaranteed freedoms, and discounting our power.

We are told to throw “sand in the gears” to slow and eventually defeat authoritarianism, but I think most of us have a too-glamorous idea of what this means. Resistance is often boringly mundane. It’s dropping the takeout order for an ICE agent, then apologetically remaking it. It’s going with your neighbor to their immigration check-in, or spamming a snitch line. It’s errors on paperwork and going to lunch when you see officials approaching. It’s putting officialdom on read until tomorrow, then asking for clarification. It’s letting a vulnerable colleague take her break when uniforms walk in, and playing dumb if they ask questions.

It’s dragging your heels on every inch, and forcing them to steal it.

It’s also pretty safe. This is not the time to make a point: your goal is to use any privilege you have — of identity or employment or personality — to obstruct. The more privilege you have, the more benefit of the doubt you’ll get over that dropped meal, or lost paperwork. Apologize profusely, then find the wrong papers or make the wrong meal. When they get mad, it’s time to comply.

Research suggests that non-violent efforts are twice as likely to succeed as violent ones, and that a movement with 3.5% of the population usually succeeds. In the US that’s around 12 million Americans, which sounds like a lot, but Oregon, Washington and California alone hold nearly 13 million Harris voters. Nationwide, she earned 75 million votes. What if each of us did one thing, each day? What if we each found one grain of sand, and chucked it into the gears.

You can't stop this. Nobody can stop this.

But everybody? All of us?

Together, we can't fail to stop it.

“The sun still shines” — Sophie Scholl’s last words.