Thread by @emilypawley

In 2007, I did kind of a weird thing.

I made a little anti-Iraq War sign, glued it to a dowel, and marched across Philadelphia with it, 1.5 hrs a day, 5 days a week, for 9 months.

I remember that before I started I was horribly angry all the time--the Bush Administration lied like this administration lies, the surge had just started, hundreds of thousands of people had died already.

And I had just been to a protest, much smaller than the protests at the beginning of the war. A little dispiriting.

But on the bus home, someone had asked about our signs.

And suddenly everyone was asking about our signs, and then we had given away our signs, and our leaflets, and the bumper stickers, and people seemed SO RELIEVED that there was still an anti-war movement.

So I thought, people have outsourced protest to old people and grubby young people (I was the latter). I should protest somewhere new.

I had just started a new job, across town, on 3rd street--I lived in West Philly, on 47th. So I decided to walk to work.

I didn't want to whap people with my sign, so I made a very small one, on a long dowel.

It said, in nice type

STOP THE WAR

March to work

I dressed up nicely for me (I had a new job! No t-shirts!) and I set off.

On the first day, I thought I was terribly brave--some of my friends had been arrested at other protests, I was going to march straight past Independence Hall which had a lot of new security and a metal detector to get in.

But I am a white woman, and I was dressed nicely, so here are some things that happened.

I saw some cops, I tensed up, they offered to help me find my tour group.

I saw some cops, I tensed up, they gave me coupons for Restaurant Week.

So, not so brave. And I didn't stop the war. But I did learn some things.

1. The people I thought would be my allies--white, middle class, alternative-looking people tensed up and stared desperately in other directions for months.

People of color would say Hey, anyone who lifted things or washed things for a living would talk to me. Construction workers would yell "What do we want, peace! When do we want it, now!"

But middle-class white people in interesting glasses would look very hard into shop windows until I had passed. Most of these people were the same people every day--one guy I passed every day at the same time on the Walnut Street Bridge.

He had a Green Crochet Beret, and he never met my eyes.

One thing would break this pattern. If another person said "nice sign" and I responded, as always, "Thanks!" and kept walking, the next five white people would dare to give me a little nod.

Like we were secret agents together. Like we were doing something dangerous.

Every few days, one of these five white people would stop and shake me by the hand and tell me that I was a hero. And I would say truthfully, you know, this is not that hard, which it was not.

And I started to notice something that other people have noticed, that having heroes, or making simple tasks into heroism, makes not doing those things easier.

Or maybe encourages us to wait for our own appropriately heroic moment to do something.

Even though I was clearly not going to stop the war with my little stick, there were a lot of reasons to keep going--for example, soldiers' family members would tell me that the sign helped them feel less forgotten.

Sometimes I had good conversations about the war. Sometimes someone would say "I wish I had a sign like that" and I'd hand it to them and make another.

Also, I developed weird nodding-friendships with other sign-carrying people on the street--labor protestors sometimes, but mostly bible-verse people, and one guy who thought the post office was attacking America by sending goliath beetles through the mail.

But today I find myself thinking about the people who were scared to look me in the eye.

I am pretty sympathetic to these people. All those introvert cartoons feel very true to me. I hate phone calls, and conflict and groups of strangers.

I think a lot of them wanted to do something about the war. Like almost all political actions, my thing seemed either too big or too small.

I'm thinking about this now because I'm tired and you're tired, because things are cascadingly, stomach-lurchingly, terrible on many different fronts. Because a lot of people are doing genuinely heroic things, and I am not.

I'm telling Twitter because I'm trying to tell myself.

To be part of a movement you have to do things that seem too small on their own.

To be brave about bigger things, it helps to practice by being a little brave about smaller things.

But practice is most meaningful if you work to level up.