The Quiet Power of Remaining Human
Even when the world is screaming, you can choose to stay kind — Light Against Empire
There are moments in history when decency looks like denial.
When empathy feels like futility.
When to be tender in the face of cruelty is to be called weak, naïve—or worse, complicit.
But I’ve come to believe something far more subversive.
To remain human… is resistance.
Not performative. Not passive. Not ornamental.
But deep, luminous defiance. A flame that does not yield to the storm.
I’ve seen what happens when people trade away their humanity in increments—when fear reshapes the face, tightens the jaw, turns the eye into a scanner for threat rather than a mirror for the soul.
I’ve seen bureaucrats justify cruelty with paperwork.
Neighbors disappear behind slogans.
Families fracture over what they’re told is “truth.”
And beneath it all, a terrible message pulses:
Be hard. Be loud. Be loyal. Be ruthless.
But for the love of Empire—don’t be human.
I. The Lie of Power
Authoritarianism doesn’t begin with tanks. It begins with subtraction.
One compromise. One silence. One cruel joke left unchallenged.
Until one day, people wake up and find they’ve outsourced their conscience for comfort.
It sells the story that morality is a luxury. That compassion is quaint. That kindness is for the weak.
But that is the first lie.
And every tyranny depends on us believing it.
James Baldwin wrote, “You think your pain and heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”
He wasn’t just talking about grief. He was talking about connection. Legacy. The soul’s inheritance. That we are not alone. That cruelty is not new. And neither is our response to it.
II. The Gentle Are Not Helpless
Kahlil Gibran said, “You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.”
That giving of self—your time, your decency, your refusal to become numb—is the quietest form of protest. And the fiercest.
We live in a time where rage is monetized.
Where algorithms reward venom.
Where debate is theater and truth is often buried beneath performance.
But kindness?
Kindness is subversive precisely because it doesn’t demand applause.
It doesn’t burn down.
It builds.
It shelters.
It stays.
Fred Rogers, who spent a life whispering dignity into children’s ears, once said, “There are three ways to ultimate success: the first is to be kind, the second is to be kind, the third is to be kind.”
They called him soft. But what he carried was harder than steel.
III. Living in Truth
Václav Havel, writing from inside a system designed to erase the individual, said that to live within the truth is to throw the lie into crisis.
It doesn’t always look like rebellion.
Sometimes it looks like a nurse refusing to falsify a report.
A teacher correcting a lie in a textbook.
A grocery clerk refusing to humiliate a hungry child.
Remaining human is not a pose. It’s a risk.
It may cost you reputation. Opportunities. Even safety.
But what’s the alternative?
To belong to the system while losing your soul?
Emily Dickinson asked, “I’m nobody! Who are you?”—a whisper of defiance against the demand to become what the world expects.
And that’s what it is, in the end: defiance.
IV. The Courage to Be Soft
We were not meant for brutality.
That may be the most dangerous truth of all.
We were meant for communion, not conquest. For creation, not cruelty. For song, not slogans.
Rabindranath Tagore prayed not to be sheltered from danger, but to be fearless in facing it.
Even as empire collapsed around him, he wrote poems.
Even as silence might have saved him, he sang.
And today, that’s what I ask of myself—
To still sing.
To not let the barbarism of others drag me down to the same level of unfeeling.
To ache and still offer love.
To be misunderstood and still speak gently.
To be exhausted and still plant seeds.
“You must give birth to your images,” Rainer Maria Rilke wrote. “They are the future waiting to be born.”
This is not poetic indulgence. This is survival.
V. The Practice of Presence
Thich Nhat Hanh said it simply: “Compassion is a verb.”
It is not enough to feel. We must embody.
We must show up—fully, awkwardly, vulnerably.
In the grocery line.
At the ballot box.
In the hard conversation with someone we love.
In the act of listening, not to reply—but to understand.
Simone Weil reminded us: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
And in this noisy age, your focused, human presence is one of the last things they cannot commodify.
So practice it. Fiercely.
VI. Holding the Line
Remaining human does not mean remaining passive.
There is a moral rigor to gentleness.
There is a discipline to compassion.
A strength to listening.
A fire beneath quiet courage.
Albert Camus once warned that the only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
To remain human in an inhuman time is exactly that kind of freedom.
Even if we lose the courts.
Even if the systems fail.
Even if the crowd bows and the cowards cheer—
You do not have to.
You can be kind.
You can be true.
You can be fully, fearlessly, unflinchingly human.
And that?
That is what tyrants fear most.
Further Reading:
Grace Under Fire: The Discipline of Dignity in a Time of Spectacle
I. Dignity in a Time of Spectacle
You've touched my soul. I've always tried to be kind to people. It really takes a lot to push me to the point where the hateful side shows. But lately with all that is going on in our country today, I've felt anger more and more. That's not me Dino! And I don't like it at all! Your writing has brought tears to my eyes. A softness has seeped back in refreshing me. Its like what you wrote has given me permission to be myself again. And to think, being me can help defeat the empire that is trying so very hard to destroy humanity and freedom! Thank you for showing me that kindness is strength; that to care is not weakness. I will resist the destroyer in my way and care for others while I slowly disrupt their plans and watch them crumble.
This pairs very well with your poem The Light is not Leaving - It’s Just Being Hidden. I am trying to hold this vision of hope too even up in Canada while we watch with horror at what’s happening so close to home.