Grip

Although you duck down to hide, the noose tightens

and before you know it you’re finding it hard to breathe.

You smile nonetheless and hope they don’t notice

your discomfort, your preference to be anywhere other

than where they are. But that’s what they really love—

the squirming that fearful people do in their presence.

And what they really hate is disdainful rejection

by those who are better than they are. Give them that,

and they will either kill you—or back away.

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When injustice infects the times, there is no staying out of it. The moment you look away from cruelty, you’ve already taken a side. History shows what happens when people keep their heads down. They may survive the first reaping, but the scythe always swings back. If you think your silence will save you, you’ve already lost your soul.

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In the early 1930s, as Germany descended into dictatorship, many educated citizens told themselves they were “not political.” They didn’t join the Nazi Party, they just carried on with life. Their shops stayed open. Their businesses served whoever came in. They avoided conversation about the missing neighbors. They attended concerts, went to church, raised their children. They imagined their non-participation was equivalent to innocence. But as Dietrich Bonhoeffer warned, “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil.” When you take no stand against daily injustices, you become complicit in them. Neutrality abets the oppressor and leaves the innocent unprotected.

The moral law is simple: to approve, adopt, or tolerate injustice is to promulgate it. You don’t have to sign your name or cast a vote to approve of injustice. The feckless shrug, the muttered “I’m staying out of it,” the willingness to keep benefitting are also forms of approval. If you hold stock in a company that uses slave labor, you cannot claim moral innocence. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it.” This is not politics. It is cause and effect. When the system is wicked, we too are wicked.

The engine of our system today runs on two fuels: greed and cruelty. Greed defends advantage—the protection of property, the preservation of status. Cruelty asserts dominance—the readiness to harm others as a demonstration of power. They feed on each other. Cruelty masks greed by cloaking theft in moral language. Greed fuels cruelty by making human suffering seem a small price for preserving privilege. History offers endless examples. Jim Crow laws were not just social cruelty; they were a way to control labor and maintain economic dominance. Colonial empires wrapped plunder in a “civilizing mission.” Aristotle warned that when citizens prize wealth above virtue, they will defend injustice as if it were justice itself.

We see this dynamic now that power has completely swallowed our politics. “Border security” means Immigration policies that rip children from their parents or keep families in squalid detention centers. “Freedom to work” means anti‑labor laws that leave workers unprotected. “Family values” means outlawing gender expression, restricting voting rights, or negating reproductive autonomy. Fear of loss, greed for advantage, and the selfishness that delights in cruelty drive our machine.

In such a system, neutrality is not safe. Keeping your head down may get someone else’s chopped off first, but it won’t be long before they come after those whose heads are bowed. Paradoxically, safety under such circumstances demands risk. You must withdraw your approval from cruelty: do not lend your name, your labor, your donations, or your silence to those doing harm. Speak plainly: reject euphemisms that conceal violence. Do not say “enhanced interrogation” when you mean torturing prisoners. Do not say “border protection” when you mean persecuting immigrants. Challenge the acquaintance who repeats the talking point, the colleague who excuses the abuse. Support the resistance: fund legal aid, join advocacy groups, volunteer to protect the harassed. Let your resistance be visible. Visible resistance makes others reconsider their own consent.

The death grip of power politics is exerted not only by its leaders. It is tightened by those who live uncomplainingly under their aegis, who explain away their cruelty, who look away from their greed. Moral adulthood begins with rejecting cruelty even when it costs you your friendships, your job, your liberty. The cost of resistance is real. But the cost of approval is far greater because they want your soul. Don’t let them have it.

If you approve evil, you own it. Don’t approve it. Don’t own it.