The Disreputable BedeI read this quote by Wendell Berry earlier this year and have been thinking about it. Berry is a farmer and writer in Kentucky and had participated in a sit-in protesting a strip mining project, IIRC.
His point is that protest is sometimes simply something we have to do to avoid losing something important about ourselves, even if it ultimately makes no difference in the outcome. You just have to do it because to stay silent would cause your heart and spirit harm.
“Much protest is naive; it expects quick, visible improvement and gives up when such improvement does not come. Protestors who hold out longer have perhaps understood that success is not the proper goal. If protest depended on success, there would be little protest of any durability or significance. History simply affords too little evidence that anyone's individual protest is of any use. Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.”
~ #wendellberry
WIST Quotations
