When should you speak up?

Little Miss Attila regrets not having showed where she stood when the audience at an LA Book Fair panel booed Hugh Hewitt (via Beautiful Atrocities).

I was disappointed in my inability to stand up for what I believe in from the midst of a crowd of people who were upset about the war in Iraq.

This inner resistence we feel is the hardest thing in the world to counter, because no one wants to be the nail that sticks up and gets pounded back down. I'll have to try harder, though: because what matters is not who wins the debate. What matters is that we keep having it.

Next time, I'll clap for Hugh. I have to.

You choose your battles. At my first job out of library school, I was sitting at the reference desk talking to a colleague when she suddenly blurted out that she wished Ronald Reagan was dead. (Obviously this was before his death. Just as obviously, she wasn't wishing for his passing because she wanted his suffering to end.) A very nice woman, who'd been very nice to me, the statement was beneath her. I ignored it. It was not the first time I had heard liberals wishing for that end.

Library school was also full of such moments. It was a given the Bush was an idjit and saying so was guaranteed to bring the speaker a laugh. Who has time to engage everyone who throws out these bon mots? On the other hand, when a particularly moronic co-worker likened the war in Iraq to the final solution I didn't half jump down her throat.

And maybe the tide is changing. My mother went to a Bat Mitzvah in California last year and overheard two men talking--all right whispering really--about how they were going to vote for Bush. At a get-together with this same group a few years earlier she found herself sitting next to someone who'd been in the same communist cell as my grandfather's second wife.