On Patriots Day: Whispers of a Revolution

Remembering the nonviolent aspects of the American Revolution and the Palestinian Resistance

Today is Patriots Day in Massachusetts. As children, my brothers and I loved the spectacle: muskets cracking, cannon smoke rising over green fields as men in costume relived the battles of Lexington and Concord. It was loud, dramatic, and full of heroism.

But beneath that smoke, beneath the mythology of gunpowder and gallant resistance, was another revolution. Quieter. Patient. Almost invisible. The kind that doesn’t kill, but refuses. That doesn’t burn, but boycotts. That builds parallel structures not to destroy, but to outgrow the ones that oppress.

Before they fired a shot, American colonists had already been resisting for years. With boycotts, petitions, shadow governments, and acts of civil disobedience, they withdrew their consent one step at a time. British imports plummeted. Merchants risked ruin. Stamp collectors resigned under pressure from public shame. Courts continued without legal stamps. Committees of Correspondence sprung up, stitching together colonies in a quiet federation of resistance.

The colonists planted Liberty Trees to gather, to proclaim, to imagine. They held funerals for Liberty, carried empty coffins through cobbled streets. Their power lay not in violence, but in unity, creativity, and refusal.

This is the version of the American Revolution we often forget: the revolution of resolve, not rifles. And in forgetting it, we overlook the power of nonviolence as a tool for transformation.

This same tool is being used today in places like Palestine.

In the West Bank village of Bil’in, every week for years, residents marched to protest the separation barrier slicing through their farmland. They carried no weapons. They faced tear gas with chants, bulldozers with bodies, and occupation with unflinching presence.

During the First Intifada, Palestinian communities built their own schools, clinics, and food networks when Israeli authorities shut theirs down. The boycott of Israeli goods continues today under the BDS movement, echoing the colonists’ Non-Importation Agreements. It is not an act of hate. It is a demand for dignity.

To draw these parallels is not to conflate histories, but to recognize patterns. Of empire. Of resistance. Of how the most effective revolutions often begin with ordinary people deciding, simply, to stop participating in their own subjugation.

Violence has shaped both the American and Palestinian stories, but violence is not the whole story. Too often, it is the only one we are told.

The nonviolent strands of these struggles are not absent. They are simply unheard. Unfilmed. Uncelebrated. But they are there. Holding the line. Planting the seeds.

Sometimes revolutions sound like cannon fire. But just as often, they sound like the creak of a printing press. Like footsteps marching without weapons. Like a shopkeeper closing his store in protest. Like the whisper of a tree in Boston, long gone, where freedom once gathered to dream.

(My thanks to Amy Antonucci for suggesting this topic)