Rallies are not enough

It began, as these things often do, with a hum. A collective murmur rising from the crevices of cities, villages, hearts, phones. A whisper turned into a chorus, and suddenly, there they were. Thousands. Hundreds of thousands. Waving placards like fragile prayers, marching like ants across a burning forest floor. Righteous, defiant, beautiful. Saturday , April 19 became an exhale, an offering.

It was exhilarating, inspirational, even transformational. But no, it is not enough.

Because power does not flinch at beauty. It does not quiver when you chant in the sun. It has heard your slogans before, memorized them, printed them on T-shirts in its factories. Power does not stand at the edge of the crowd, trembling. It sits, bored, behind tinted windows, texting lobbyists and sipping its drinks.

These rallies are the soft beginning. Not the answer.

I watched the rallies. Not from a rooftop or a drone or a TV screen, but through the ragged breath of an old woman in Al Khalil (Hebron) whose grandson disappeared last year, last month, last minute into the bureaucratic maw of a system that erases people like typos. I watched them through the silence of a boy in Rafah, whose house is rubble and whose hands are learning not to shake when drones buzz. I watched them in the quiet dignity of a farmer in the South Hebron Hills who marched not for ideology, but because the soil speaks louder than news anchors.

They were there, all of them, ghost-walking through the crowd.

And then the banners were rolled up. The chants faded. The feet grew sore. People returned home, fed their children, posted photos. The algorithms applauded. The world, momentarily shaken, began to settle back in to the seats of power.

And the ones we march for? Still dying. Still displaced. Still unnamed.

We forget that protest is not revolution. It is the punctuation mark before a sentence not yet written. It is the drumroll, not the act.

Look closer. Behind the grand speeches and overhead drone shots, you’ll find the quiet complicities. The NGOs funded by the same empires they claim to resist. The permits granted by the very governments being protested. The politicians who showed up for photo ops, mouthing solidarity and love with pockets brimming with lobbyists cash.

It is not enough to be angry once a week.

It is not enough to walk side by side if, come Monday, you return to work building the same machine you marched against.

Rebellion is not a weekend hobby. It is a choice that bleeds into breakfast, into love, into the books you read and the money you spend and the comfort you forfeit.

Join activist organizations. Donate as much time and money as you can to the groups that doing the work of building the resistance. Talk to your friends and family.

Because the ones we struggle against do not sleep. They do not pause. Their machinery runs on the fuel of our forgetting.

And so, if we are to matter, we must become ungovernable not just in parks and squares but in kitchens and classrooms. We must disrupt not just traffic but transactions. Not just timelines but time itself.

This is not to say stop marching. No. March until your feet blister and your voice breaks. But know this: marching is the dress rehearsal. The real play happens after the lights go out.

In whispers shared under curfews. In food grown outside the supply chains. In love that defies borders. In schools that teach truth, not obedience.

The world we want will not arrive because we asked politely on a Saturday afternoon. It will be wrestled, brick by brick, from the jaws of systems that have learned to survive applause.

Last Saturday was a beautiful echo. But echoes fade.

Let us become the sound that does not.

Michael “Lefty” Morrill is the Organizing Director of New Hampshire Peace Action