There was a summer in the late ’90s—hot, static, and steeped in the hiss of CRTs—when I stood at the edge of a protest in downtown Denver. Nothing revolutionary, just a mass of sweat-drenched humans screaming at clouds, or more specifically, the WTO. I was there on a lark, tagging along with a grad school friend who chain-smoked Camels and quoted Zinn like scripture.
I watched from the sidewalk, arms crossed like a cultural anthropologist observing an extinct ritual. Police in riot gear lined the streets like extras from a dystopian B-movie. Signs bobbed with righteous fury. Someone in a gas mask shouted about Monsanto and genetically modified crops as if shouting could photosynthesize change. And me? I did what I’d been trained to do: I analyzed. I overthought. I performed the internal calculus of risk and reward, comfort and conviction. And then I left. Back to my air-conditioned apartment and my Kafka paper.
The protest was ultimately dispersed with tear gas and batons. No revolution was sparked, no systems toppled. But my absence stayed with me—not because I believed that particular protest would have changed the world, but because I failed to show up. Not for the cause, necessarily, but for myself. I stood at the threshold of an experience and chose inertia. Analysis became anesthesia.
If I could do it again, I’d walk into the center of that crowd. Not as a savior, not even as a participant with answers, but as a body among bodies. I’d let the chant ring in my chest. I’d hold a sign—not because I thought it would fix anything, but because bearing witness matters. Because sometimes the most radical act is simply being present when history hums just beneath the pavement.
And who knows? Maybe I’d have caught a baton to the ribs. Maybe I’d have met someone who changed my life. Or maybe I’d have just sweated through my shirt and gone home sore. But I wouldn’t have wondered, years later, what kind of man I might’ve been if I’d stepped off the curb.
What about you—ever stand still when your soul told you to run straight into the fire?