The Marvelous María Beatriz and I were invited to dinner not long ago with some very lovely people, almost all of them of the Bahá'í faith and whom we met a year ago at the wedding of Yael, at whose house we were meeting and who was cooking up a storm of Persian food. (Names have been changed.) The talk was genial and gentle, wending this way and that. Then Zach and his wife, Aviva, were talking about the volunteer work they do in their town, committed as they are to being involved as good citizens and "being part of the solution, not the problem." He related a story about a school board meeting being hijacked by a group of anti-mask proponents (the town has a mask mandate, which was in effect the night of the board meeting). According to Zach, the board members huddled in private session for a short time, then adjourned the meeting since the anti-mask people were not going to follow the mandate. (The police officer usually assigned to the meeting was not there that night, for some reason, Zach said, so there was no muscle in the room, so to speak, to move them along.) The talk then shifted to comments about how so much better it would be if people would just care about their fellow citizens and not politicize an important health measure and (not to be sarcastic) some variation on the Rodney King statement about "why can't we all just get along?" So, me being me, I had to ask the question I asked, and I asked it because I'm reading How Civil Wars Start by Barbara F. Walter (and, in our American situation today, one of the ways a civil war could get started is like this, with guerilla tactics by dissidents that gum up the democratic workings and put everyone on edge and thus a bit more inclined toward autocracy than they might otherwise have been). I asked Zach that, yes, the board solved the problem of the next meeting by having it online (though that's no guarantee of security, since meetings can be hacked), but that's not a permanent solution, so what happens the next time they show up? What I was getting at, though I didn't say it outright because to have done so would have been rude, was this: how willing are you get to as dirty as they are to quash what they are doing and the danger they present? And it's not even "dirty" in the fist-to-nose sort of way but in the face-to-face sort of way: not hand the control off to the police officer on duty but to stand square and say (and be willing to work through), "Come, let us reason together." My question was also prompted by a shift in the discussion, from Aviva, about Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter from a Birmingham Jail and how beautiful his sentiments were about loving the enemy and foregoing violence. The answering of the question didn't go far (I didn't expect it to and didn't push it—after all, this was a dinner among friends, not a political confrontation), but I at least wanted to get the idea into the air as something of a balance to the pacificism and the poetry flowing out from the others (and from a book of Bahá'í prayers to Zach's left). (Later in the evening, Zach and I talked about David Graeber and Occupy and the Quakers and the how-to of speaking with love to a person who may very well hate you. He knows that building consensus and the humanitarian guidelines of the faith needed to be brought into the mix, he just wasn't quite sure how that could be worked into a town meeting of the Board of Education at 7 p.m. on a Wednesday night during the time of COVID.) Still later, though along the same lines, Aviva brought up a story about what she considered a perfectly thrilling and inspiring event that happened at a TED-sponsored event at COP26 in Scotland on Oct. 14, 2021, when a climate activist, Lauren MacDonald, publicly chastised Ben van Beurden, CEO of Royal Dutch Shell, in the following way: "Mr. van Beurden, I just want to start by saying that you should be absolutely ashamed of yourself for the devastation you have caused to communities all over the world. Already, you are responsible for so much death and suffering," going on to deliver an indictment against him and everything connected to the fossil fuel industry. (The video of the full accusation runs on any number of websites.) Much at the dinner table was made of her passion, the pain she must have felt in doing this, the strength of her commitment. Which, yes, is all true, as anyone can attest to after watching the performance (and from her own selfie videos where she spoke about the fear and resolve she felt). But I wanted to chime in with (but didn't), weren't we saying the same thing about Greta Thunberg in 2018 (who also did a TED talk), about how the youth would prevail where the geezers, compromised by life, can't and how important it is to speak truth to power? And what change has that made in the last four years? And what change, really, will happen after Lauren MacDonald's diatribe against Shell? Yes, he will feel embarrassed, perhaps even personally moved, but his overlords don't care, and that means that in the end, he won't (and literally can't afford to) care, either. (Cue Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!") And how risky and dangerous it is to put such faith in the power of a performance and performance in general to redirect the interests of the capitalist regime toward more humanitarian actions. As with the unmasked anti-maskers at the school board meeting: what happens if the power of goodness and light and compassion and moral urgency are not enough to save ourselves from ourselves? When is it permissible to amp up the confrontation (as with the Luddites, in the book I'm reading titled Breaking Things at Work by Gavin Muellar) and throw a monkey wrench into the works? I seriously love that my dinner mates believe as they believe, that they are committed to the bright side of the force, and there is much to be gained by sharing the thrill and deep resonance of a commitment to living out strong moral convictions. I also think their analysis is incomplete if they also do not consider forceful resistance as a force of equal importance and weight to whatever King Jr. wrote from his jail cell. Given their dedication to a binary of light and dark forces, they cannot give "dark" equal billing to "light," but it is also possible to re-think the dark as another form of light, complementary and not antithetical, an option to be used when those of good heart cannot prevail by argument, suasion or compassion against those who care nothing about a good heart and have only a desire for power for guidance.