“Speak English,” she says, exasperated. “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
I had used only one word — “Schweyk,” the anti-hero from one of Bertolt Brecht’s plays.
My wife Gloria and I were driving toward Tomales Bay for her birthday weekend — hills, cows, sharp curves, the ocean in the distance. Beautiful. We were breathing out the city.
And still, I couldn’t stop myself.
“Can you give me a single story of the heroism of not-resisting? Of not-standing-out? Of capitulating, even betraying your values — and still being right?”
She looked at me as if I were from another planet. “Please stop,” she said. “Be in the here-and-now.”
Two contrasting events had happened that morning – I was still chewing on them
One, The Boy Who Would Not Die
That morning I’d read a piece by Jack Hopson — one of those newsletters meant to keep us fighting for democracy. It told the story of Edgar Harrell, a seventeen-year-old Marine from Kentucky who survived the sinking of the USS Indianapolis and five nights in shark-infested water. He refused to give up; he believed rescue was coming; he lived.
It’s the kind of story America loves: willpower, faith, grit. The boy who would not die becomes proof that courage is always rewarded. Believe, and you will prevail.
Except most of us aren’t Edgar Harrell. We aren’t made for sharks and miracles. The story inspires and shames us at once. It sets the bar out of reach. We admire heroes best when they are far away or safely dead. In real life, they are exhausting. Impossible to live with.
Hopson thinks he’s encouraging us. He’s not. It’s discouraging because we know these are the exceptions. In his story, hundreds of sailors perish. Did they lack courage? Faith?
Two, The Townsquare and the Fear of Speaking
A little later I looked over an email I received – for the upcoming community event and meeting of neighborhood non-profit groups, our Townsquare Democracy group was not going to be allowed to have a small stand at our Noe Valley Townsquare – the neighborhood’s public space. The administrators hesitated: political activity, they said, isn’t allowed in San Francisco parks.
Politics? Defending the Constitution not allowed?
The administrators assured us they agreed completely with our goals. We could be on the sidewalk, freedom of speech, no problems. Just not part of the city Rec and Park’s event. We know each other well, they are good people.
I am trying to control my breathing – control my pumping lungs, in, hold, and out, in, hold and out. I am trying hard not to get angry.
People hesitate. They want to speak truthfully but glance around first. They measure the mood before speaking. We often call it pre-emptive compliance — the habit of yielding before anyone demands it. Historian Timothy Snyder calls it anticipatory obedience — in German, vorauseilender Gehorsam, literally “rushing-ahead obedience.” The first step into tyranny, he warns, is self-censorship dressed up as being smart.
So, is being a hero the only way?
Frankl and Brecht: Two Other Languages of Courage
Viktor Frankl, in the Nazi death camps, found another form of endurance — not victory, not survival, but meaning. Even stripped of everything, one can still choose one’s attitude: a candle lit in the dark, invisible but defiant.
Bertolt Brecht looked from another angle. In his 1943 play Schweyk in the Second World War, his Prague everyman stumbles through fascism by pretending to cooperate, mocking tyranny from within. He endures imprisonment, a stint as office assistant to an SS general, forced army labor all the way to Stalingrad — and somehow returns. No glory, no happy ending. Just irony and survival. Sometimes that’s enough.
Brecht’s line from The Threepenny Opera still bites:
“Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral.”
First comes the feed, then comes morality.
The anxious mouse understands that line better than the heroic dog. You can’t eat principles. Staying alive is not cowardice. Sometimes it’s strategy.
Between Heroism and Hesitation
Those are the extremes — the boy among sharks, Frankl in the camps, Schweyk in the madness of war. That’s not where we are.
Most of us — appalled by Trump’s character and the rot he represents — live in uncertainty. Like our neighborhood organizers and their hesitation. I am thinking of Timothy Snyder’s rule no. 20 - Be as courageous as you can.
- Is open resistance always right, or can keeping daily life intact be its own kind of resistance?
- Can I keep my head down until it blows over?
- Should I disrupt my life, my family, my friendships?
- Can I wait until a better moment — after the exam, after the move, after the crisis?
- What are the real risks for me, my future, my family?
- And what can I really do?
All these questions are valid. The hesitation isn’t cowardice; it’s realism.
And finally: do we have an obligation toward society — toward our country — to speak up?
What story will my grandchildren tell their children when they talk about the 2020s?
We do it to stay safe, to get along. But each time we silence ourselves, we clear a little more space for the bully, the censor, the autocrat. And we tell ourselves it’s nothing — only the Townsquare.
The Virtue of Getting By
I still think about that drive with Gloria. Maybe she was right to tell me to “speak English.” What I wanted to say was messy: that not all resistance looks heroic; that there’s courage in waiting, in watching, in choosing your moment.
The hero rushes forward; the anxious mouse survives. Between those two is where most of us live. There’s no single rule — sometimes defiance, sometimes silence, sometimes delay. The art is to see clearly, to use time in our favor, to keep the small spaces open until truth can breathe again.
And maybe I carry a special inheritance. No, not a debt — a rare opportunity for multi-generational learning. I was born in Germany, the grandchild of those who didn’t pay attention soon enough. They told themselves they were being prudent, decent, orderly. They weren’t. The cost of their silence is the shadow under every word I write.
All of it — Frankl’s candle, Brecht’s irony, the Townsquare hesitations — is what I wished I’d said then, driving toward Tomales Bay. A muddled defense of timidity, maybe. Or just a confession:
I believe in getting by — in staying human long enough that courage, when it finally comes, still has someone left to inhabi