Don’t let them steal your struggle
In praise of taking time
The June 14 ‘No Kings’ marches across the US hadn’t fully dispersed before online commenters started projecting national turnout. Over the next 24 hours, estimates of total crowd sizes ranged wildly: from 2 million to over 13 million. Photographic evidence put the lie to the ‘hundreds’ and ‘thousands’ some politically-motivated media outlets cited, but proponents latched onto numbers as insubstantial as pixels, too impatient to wait for experts to analyze data and render their verdicts.
Some of the urgency was driven by a desire to meet the ‘3.5% rule’ lately adopted from Erica Chenoweth’s research.1 According to this rule-in-name-only, no regime has been able to withstand non-violent sustained protest by 3.5% of its population. For the US, 3.5% equates to about 12 million people. This political science data point (which is less a rule than an observation) finds itself repurposed as a KPI for resistance protestors. Unfortunately, that isn’t the way this works. Nothing magical happens when 3.5% of a population engages in peaceful protest.
I suggest not that the numbers don’t matter, but that the social effects of non-violent mass protest matter more. Non-violence renders a protest movement inclusive: anyone can join when you’re asked to bring a sign, not a gun. Seeing people you know protesting gives permission and an invitation to join. The more socially normalized protest becomes, the more it exerts pressure on those whose support a regime relies. When people abdicate pillars of support, the regime collapses.
No doubt frustrating to people who want a quick fix to quell anti-constitutional maneuvers, building sufficient social pressure to alter political allegiances takes time. While this works to the immediate advantage of transgressors, it benefits the opposition over the long term. Time enables opening sequential avenues of resistance while building consensus, so that major events (like national strikes) receive the broad support necessary to be meaningful.
The passage of time also allows for the natural emergence of leaders who can articulate and channel what is at first inchoate anger. Unless that rage is translated into strategy and tactics, the protest flames out. This was the issue with Occupy Wall Street. Structuring the movement within the confines of a public encampment ensured it was temporary. Having set a constrained stage, the protestors needed to force outcomes—leadership and strategy—that required time to develop organically. Time is an enabler, not an enemy, of protest movements.
Those who feel the need to measure where the US is right now (has it ‘crossed the line’ into authoritarianism? Were the protests large enough?) take comfort in talking points like the 3.5% rule, a shadow government, or national strikes. These concepts are measurable and actionable—hallmarks from corporate strategy. They offer resolutions that are quick to apprehend and easy to imagine, if not simple to execute. They’re the ‘one weird trick’ that promises to produce results within weeks.
No one wants to extend suffering, and few are inspired by arduous journeys with no identifiable end in sight. People want to play a part in history-making. They seek the thrill of stories that culminate in cinematic success, like Nelson Mandela negotiating the end of South African apartheid with President F. W. de Klerk. But focusing solely on the end to South African apartheid elides the 27 years of imprisonment that Mandela suffered at the hands of minority rule. Perhaps we remember Slobodan Milošević being overthrown when his security forces stood down. Do we recall that his political demise occurred after 11 years of despotic, murderous rule and wide-spread protests?
Final acts happen quickly, but they’re the culmination of years marked with fear, privation, loss, and mundane courage to survive and build a social movement, day after grueling day. Opposition slogs through one act of resistance after another, unable to spot the end in sight but remaining steadfast nonetheless.
Unfortunately, people have become habituated to instantaneous results and addicted to Pavlovian rewards. Until they broke down during the pandemic, supply chains operated in the shadows. Consumers never wondered how they could place an order online and receive it at their door the next day…until it all stopped. Websites were filled with images of items ‘on backorder.’ Retailers gave up attempting to estimate delivery dates. Consumers resented having to revert to delivery expectations they’d held only a few years prior. It was a dismal time for anyone working in customer service. They couldn’t make goods appear from thin air, which is what the customer demanded.
Online pundits with the quickest, hottest takes are rewarded with likes and shares, metrics that drive their income. This incentive system has no care for the potential harms of a bad hot take, as witnessed with this weekend’s tragic news of the politically-motivated killings in Minnesota. If jumping to the wrong conclusion carried a cost, the perpetrators wouldn’t double down.2 Those who wait for facts, verify them from multiple sources, and synthesize information into a credible narrative are the losers here, along with the public. That was once the remit of journalism. Now, it’s to broadcast “BREAKING:” before the latest snippet gleaned elsewhere online. Is it any wonder that people choose words like ‘chaos,’ ‘confusion,’ and ‘frustration’ to explain how they’re feeling?
In an age of hot takes, be the one with a cool take
Recently, I saw an online poster brag that while ‘you’ take two hours to read a book, he takes minutes to manipulate various AI technologies to solve any problem, leaving him with 58 minutes to drink his coffee. He intended to humble us book readers living in an analog world, while he demonstrated his intellectual superiority.3
Perhaps if he’d invested his minutes in using an ancient tool called logic, he’d realize his hypothetical demonstrated not his intelligence but his failure to use it. He advocates outsourcing his intelligence to a machine. Whatever solution he receives from the bowels of AI isn’t, definitionally, created by his own intelligence. The more he relies on this outsourced service, the less capable his own intelligence will become. Will he even be able to discern the accuracy of the machine’s answer? If the outsourced solution fails, what is the cost?
Reading a book doesn’t simply transfer the author’s thoughts to your brain. Only some of the author’s intent will survive, in part due to the variable skill of an author to communicate what’s intended, and also due to the reader’s intermittent attention, split between the book’s words and distractions, both internal and external. Most authors would likely be thrilled if 60% of what they intended to say implants itself in a reader’s conscious thought.
One of those distractions is the reader’s response to the writing: the words make a connection in the reader’s mind, and off you go, thoughts washing against the shore of the reading experience. When this happens with enough force and repetition, the reader finishes the book having made the ideas one’s own. Reading transforms the reader. The most successful authors lose ownership of their ideas to readers who incorporate them into their philosophies and even identities.
You can’t replicate this experience by perusing Spark Notes—which is a form of reading—or by submitting a query to an AI agent. Reading is slow because it is more than the sum of translating words from symbols into representative meaning. It takes time to allow oneself to succumb to the emotional force of a book, to disagree and argue with what you understand to be the author’s perspective, to permit yourself to change your mind.
While it’s unfortunate that fewer people read each year, the solution isn’t to steal the struggle.
“Last fall, the NEA reported how, according to its 2022 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA), conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, 48.5 percent of adults reported having read at least one book in the past year, compared with 52.7 percent five years earlier, and 54.6 percent ten years earlier. Meanwhile, in 2022, just 37.6 percent reported reading a novel or short story, compared with 41.8 percent in 2017 and 45.2 percent in 2012.”
Sunil Iyengar, “Federal Data on Reading for Pleasure: All Signs Show a Slump,” Oct 3, 2024
Test Prep Insights’ 2025 poll found that almost half (48.5%) of adult respondents had not read a book in the prior 12 months. The rationales for this decline are varied: school disruptions caused during the pandemic has led to a decline in skill and interest in reading; the rise of social media has shortened attention spans and maxed out personal time that was previously spent elsewhere; the decline in popularity of reading, creating a vicious cycle in which the fact of fewer readers reinforces perceptions of reading as a socially unacceptable activity, which leads to even fewer readers.4 The rewards of reading derive from effort. It’s neither quick nor flashy. Yet, it can change lives.
One of my daughter’s teachers once cautioned me: “Don’t steal her struggle.” I was quick to prompt my daughter as she labored over her math homework, giving her hints, telling her each step to take. I wanted to plant the answer in her brain. It was foolish of me, and I earned that teacher’s admonition. The homework answer isn’t important. She needed to understand the logic inside numerical relationships. Only she could do this for herself. By struggling. By failing, then discovering a connection that develops into a breakthrough moment. With that experience, she could produce right answers for the rest of her life, not merely to pass a test.
Citing Moore’s Law,5 techno-enthusiasts want us to believe that we live in an age of ever-rapidly increasing technological innovation that knows no bounds. They don’t recognize that innovation isn’t limited by numbers (or costs) of transistors, but of humans themselves: their creativity, their ability to develop technology that solves real problems, their desires, their interests.
Everything exists within a social construct, and the humans essential to it remain as stubbornly flawed as we’ve ever been. We can develop as individuals, but it’s difficult and takes time. Don’t give up the struggle.
Ellie’s Corner
The children of Melissa and Mark Hortman published a statement on the loss of their parents this past weekend to political violence. “Pet a dog,” they wrote, “A golden retriever is ideal but any will do.”6
The statement ended with these profound words:
“Hope and resilience are the enemy of fear. Our parents lived their lives with immense dedication to their fellow humans. This tragedy must become a moment for us to come together. Hold your loved ones a little closer. Love your neighbors. Treat each other with kindness and respect.”
Thanks for reading,
In conversation with Jon Favreau on his Pod Save America podcast (link above), Chenoweth explained her research and clarified her thesis. The ‘rule,’ as bandied online, leaves a lot of questions hanging. What is sustained protest? Is the 3.5% for one march, the aggregate of all marches, or the requirement for every march? Does it matter whether the numbers come from a few places or many? She links mass protest to past regime changes so that it makes sense. It’s a very good interview.
Senator Lee has since deleted his incendiary and ill-considered posts, days later.
I haven’t provided a link because I don’t want to contribute to his incentives.
Book bans similarly reinforce that reading is socially unacceptable. Removing books that add color and variation to a library also disincentivizes young readers who might otherwise find books that speak to their interests.
Moore’s Law is the observation that the number of transistors will double every two years but costs will rise minimally. An exponential rise in computing power implies that we should expect innovation to speed up ever faster year by year. You can have your own ‘cool take’ on whether you think our experience bears out the innovation curve. On the semiconductor aspect, there’s a physical lower limit to be considered.
Tragically, the gunman also took the life of their family dog named Gilbert, a golden retriever.
This is wonderful! Hopeful, yet realistic of where we are in history. A good reminder that while courage may be contagious, we must also be patient.
Excellent observations and guidance. Love your thinking. And your writing.
Thanks for the Ellie picture. Everyone knows black dogs with white "accents" are the best and the sweetest, right? Woof! - from Sophie the Wonder Dog.