It Only Takes One

For a long time, I’ve been feeling like Cassandra, of the Greek myths. Lately, I've been feeling marginally more connected, like something is moving, something is shaking loose.

For a long time, I’ve been feeling like Cassandra, of the Greek myths. If you’ll recall, Cassandra was a Trojan princess who had the unfortunate experience of being sought after by Apollo. You know how gods chasing humans goes—inevitably, she was cursed. She was granted the ability to see into the future, and yet, was cursed that nobody would ever believe her. (As kind of a schadenfreude aside, she warned her captor Agamemnon, that his wife would kill him, and he didn’t believe her, resulting in his death, so maybe not a happy ending, but at least she got a hint of revenge).

But the point here is that I’ve been writing, talking, hinting, yelling for almost ten years about what a problem Trump would be for our nation. Whereas many on the left believed, nowhere near enough did. I’m not sure why. It seems like people really didn’t, and many still don’t, want to believe that American humans are just as gullible as humans all over the planet. There’s nothing special about Americans that isn’t also true about Venezuelans, or Mexicans, or Romans, or French, or Germans, or Armenians, or Filipinos, or…well, you get the point. We have fun (and delicious) cultural differences, but at the end of the day, humans everywhere are still hierarchical animals, many of whom pursue power over all else.

For almost ten years, I’ve been talking about the danger Trump and his cadre of miscreants would bring to our nation. Over that time, I’ve lost friends who claimed, basically, to exchange one metaphor for another, that I’m the boy who cried wolf. “It’s just politics as usual,” they said. I’d never seen politics like that in the nearly fifty years I’ve been on this Earth, but younger people, just turning into voters, had been raised on the vitriol of social media. To them, I guess, this stuff became normalized in nearly record time.

What keeps someone like me going when friends are dropping like flies because they “aren’t interested in politics” and even family are denying that I heard what I so clearly heard come out of Trump’s mouth?

This thought: all it takes is one.

All it takes is one. If you’ve watched things like the longest domino wall or bobbed your head along to Rachel Platten, then you’ll understand where I’m going with this. That domino wall doesn’t fall until that first domino is toppled. Seriously, watch the video; it’s pretty amazing and will calm your brain for a minute. Cathartic, even. And “it only takes one match to start an explosion.”

It only takes one whisper to start a revolution.

That’s what we saw with this Jimmy Kimmel thing. It’s hard to believe that. But if you trace it back, there’s likely one, or maybe a couple of people, that began the whole thing, and suddenly, one of the largest corporations in America changed allegiances. Do you realize how powerful that is?

This is what I’ve been saying. We have the power. We just sometimes forget.

No Kings is coming up on October 18^th.

Remember the last one? It started out as an idea in someone’s head and grew into an organization, and now they hold regular online training on how to resist, in preparation for the upcoming protest. They are organizing. Indivisible was just an idea at one time, and now they are a force. Black Lives Matter is the same, an idea born.

Whispers.

In a storm of screaming and shouting, these movements are born as whispers. These movements are real now, and they aren’t going anywhere. But I encourage you, as the next No Kings Day approaches, to remember the words of Gil Scott-Heron: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.

The revolution is you and me talking, organizing, and taking to the streets. The revolution is the power we bring in our numbers. It takes a whisper to start, but it takes a listener to hear, and a follower to repeat that whisper and build an unstoppable movement. We can’t all start our own movements, but we can lend our voice to the good ones. And a thousand whispers can create wind, a hundred thousand, a typhoon. A million?

You are a hurricane. You are a tsunami. You are the moon falling to the Earth.

A hundred million?

Let’s find out.

10.18.2025

<whispering> Pass it on.