I’ve been thinking a lot about The Last Jedi since seeing it on Thursday night and I’ve been talking a lot about it since publishing my spoiler-filled critique of it on Friday afternoon. What follows contains Last Jedi spoilers, of course. So stop right here if you don’t want to read any of those.

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#MeToo, #IWill, and What Comes After

Please bear with me a moment for something uncomfortable.

I haven’t written anything at all about the powerful #MeToo and #IWill campaigns on Twitter and Facebook. I didn’t write anything at the time because I didn’t want to signal that one of the good guys who stands up for women or pat myself on the back for times when I’ve done so; the issue is far too serious for that sort of thing, I think.

That isn’t to say that men who did those things ought to feel bad for having done them. I think people have seriously good intentions here. That said–and here’s the uncomfortable part–good intentions often don’t amount to much.

Fighting against the culture of pervasive sexual harassment and assault is going to require action on the part of men. And saying you’ll take action isn’t the same thing as *actually* taking action. From years of researching and teaching on the topic of heroism, I know a lot about bystander behavior. And one of the things that comes across loud and clear is that no one imagines themselves as a bystander in a crisis situation.

People look at a tragedy and say, “I know I’d help” or “I promise I’ll be a person you can turn to.” Except helpers remain relatively rare. And it’s not because people are bad or insincere in their desire to be a helper; it’s because standing up against injustice or rushing into danger is exceedingly hard to do in the moment. You can think about it today and you can commit to doing the hard thing, but that’s very different from actually doing it in the moment.

When the moment comes—when someone falls to the floor and needs CPR or when the boss makes inappropriate remarks about a female colleague—you have to make a snap decision…and people usually don’t have the clarity in that moment to know they’re making one of those big, important, difficult decisions. It happens too fast. You either help or you don’t; you either say something or you stay quiet. When asked about this moment later, heroes typically say something like, “I didn’t even think about it; I just did it.”

So, how do we become people who stand up and speak out? We have to practice. It feels like instinct or muscle memory for the hero because the hero has been in training for this moment for a long time. Which means that, if we’re serious about our #IWill promises, we have to start training ourselves now. We can’t expect to say we’ll do something one week in 2017 and actually do that thing five years from now, a year from now, or even next week. In fact, we need to understand that it’s almost a certainty that we won’t.

Here are two things you can do, starting today, that will make it more likely you’ll be the sort of person you want to be, the ally for the person you say you want to support:

1. Make yourself uncomfortable.

If you want to be a person who stands up to sexual harassment and abuse, you need to practice standing out…because that’s precisely what you’ll be doing when the situation arises. It’s hard to tell someone that what they’ve just said or done is inappropriate and needs to stop. It’s hard to intervene, especially if you’re dealing with a superior, a friend, or a family member, and it’s particularly hard to do all of this in public.

So practice calling attention to yourself. It’s uncomfortable to be the person who sticks out in a crowd, who isn’t going with the flow, but that’s exactly what you’ll need to do so you should start working on dealing with the awkward feeling now so you aren’t fighting the pressure to conform in the moment. The things that make you uncomfortable will be different from the things that make other people uncomfortable, so I can only offer general ideas here.

Maybe it’s wearing something that makes you stand out, like bright pink pants. Maybe it’s singing out loud when you’re walking down the street. Maybe it’s being completely honest when you’re asked for your opinion. Maybe it’s shaking hands or looking people in the eye during an entire conversation. You pick what works for you so you can practice having the experience of standing out.

2. Do small good things.

By this, I mean that you should be on the look-out for opportunities to help people in small ways. Because even small, cost-free helping behavior can get you in the habit and prime you for the more costly behavior toward which we’re trying to build.

Hold doors for others, including elevator doors, especially if it means delaying yourself a little longer than you’d normally like. Return someone’s shopping cart if you’re on your way into a store and they’ve just finished loading their car. Volunteer some of your time once a week for a cause or organization that matters to you. Ask people if they need anything when you get up to get something for yourself of if you’re leaving a room to which you’ll soon return.

The idea here is to work on becoming a person who notices opportunities to assist other people, so you might need to spend less time with earbuds in or looking at your phone. The more you’re paying attention to what’s happening around you, the more you’ll see that there are lots of times when people could benefit from some help even before they ask for it.

There are other things to do, of course, and once you start thinking this way—about practicing to be the person you want to be—I’m sure they’ll start coming to you. Feel free to help me make a longer list. This is just a beginning, but beginnings can be challenging so I encourage all of us to work together to get ourselves in the habit of standing up, speaking out, and becoming available as an ally for others.

I’ve seen a few hundred of my friends share videos of a passenger being forcibly removed from a United flight because it was oversold. What I haven’t seen yet–which is why I’m writing about it–is any discussion of all the passengers who remain calmly seated while the man is dragged down the aisle. Every passenger sat still. Some voiced disapproval, but no one moved.

What do we think would have happened if all the other passengers had chosen to act on this man’s behalf instead of sitting still? What if some of them had stood up and walked off the flight instead of allowing one man to be physically removed in this ghastly manner?

It seems to me important to note that there isn’t something wrong per se with involving the United States in the Syrian crisis in a meaningful way with the hope of bringing that crisis to an end and alleviating the terrible suffering of the Syrian people. In fact, I’ve been arguing about intervention in Syria for about six years now. There’s an extensive library of posts about Syria on this blog, going back to 2011.

To sit back and watch horror after unspeakable horror unfold is itself a choice; it is to actively choose not to involve ourselves in any sort of meaningful way that might bring those horrors to an end. We might choose non-intervention because we believe that we have no business interfering in the affairs of other states, that bombing a country doesn’t magically lead to good things happening there, or that we have such a bad track record of doing so that we ought not to keep doing it because we don’t know how to make things better.
I happen to be someone who doesn’t hold to these positions. Allowing harm on this level to occur feels, in its own way, criminal to me. But I also think we must spend time figuring out how to intervene in ways that advance the interests of the people on whose behalf we say we are intervening. Simply dropping bombs isn’t a long-term answer and neither is a decades-long military presence; if those are the only options we ever consider, we will continue to fail to make life better for people.

We’re not doing that difficult work. That’s something we all know. Launching 50 missiles at a Syrian airfield is an act of war undertaken without Congressional approval and it’s also the actions of a man with no plan whatsoever for what comes next. One week ago, the Trump administration indicated that Assad was likely to remain in power; a few days later, Assad launched a chemical weapons attack against civilians; the next day, the Trump administration spoke openly about regime change and unilateral miliary action against Assad. President Trump isn’t guided by any sort of careful foreign policy considerations; he and his team seem literally to be making it all up as they do, which means there’s no long-term plan for our involvement in Syria. By all accounts, there isn’t even a short-term plan. This missle strike was done to highlight Trump’s own humanity in response to the chemical attack, not to change our policy regarding the Syrian crisis, Assad himself, or the Syrian people who aren’t helped by this in any way and who President Trump continues to bar from entering our country as refugees. Nothing whatsoever has shifted, apart from media coverage (which today lauds President Trump for his meaningless action and looks away from Trump’s unprecedented scandals and inept attempts at governance).

If President Trump cared about the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria, he could immediately change his policy regarding Syrian refugees and he could begin to work closely with our allies around the world to craft a plan that might help bring about an end to the Syrian civil war. This would be incredibly difficult, of course, and there are no guarantees that any such plan would actually work. But it’s perfectly clear that no one on Trump’s staff has any relevant experience in this area or any real interest in learning and so we’re definitely not going to be doing those things that might actually make a difference in the lives of people who are suffering; we won’t even attempt it.

In the end, we have no idea what the fallout will be from this missile strike and neither does our President. There might be none, given that we seem to have notified the Russians and the Syrians beforehand. All we know this morning is that it didn’t accomplish anything at all with regard to making Syria a safer place for civilians and it sent the same dangerous message of uncertainty that this administration has been sending for months to our allies and our enemies alike.

Over the past week or two, I’ve spent a fair amount of time, both online and offline, on the Betsy DeVos nomination for a bunch of reasons. The first is I’m from Detroit. There aren’t many people from Michigan who think her ideas about public education are good. And with good reason. We’ve seen it firsthand.

I’m also, now, from Nebraska. A lot of my students come from very small towns where there’s one school. Public education is crucial for them. These communities are too small for their school to survive on vouchers, or at least to maintain any sort of quality education for all. The notion that there will be competition amongst various charter schools for these tiny communities is obviously ridiculous on its face. Implementing DeVos’ ideas will wreck rural communities. People will either have to leave, settle for bad education, or drive their kids hours away to whichever school can draw in sufficient students to stay open.

The thing is, I’m involved in this issue for purely public interest reasons. I’d personally benefit from a voucher system. I’d actually make money! If the government gave me a check for, I don’t know, $10,000 per kid, and I paid my regular tuition for private day school, I’d actually come out ahead. I make no secret of the fact that I send my own kids to a private school and that I went to private schools myself. As a religious minority, I choose this for my kids because it helps to instill a sense of identity for them. (There are lots of other reasons I choose private school for them, but most of them boil down to things that public schools just can’t do for them given the resources available to them.)

But maybe this is why I’m a Democrat these days: I can tell when something that would personally benefit me is still the wrong thing to do. Even though I’d love to have that money in my pocket instead of paying as much as I do, I know that public education is good and necessary. I don’t choose it for my kids for a particular reason, not because I’m forced to by public schools that have failed. And, more than that, I want my neighbors to have quality schools. I want that so much that I pay for those schools with my taxes and then I also pay for my kids’ tuition out of pocket.

Public education is a public good even if I don’t personally use it. My kids, when grown up, will need their neighbors to have been educated. We can’t survive as a country if our public schools are garbage. One look at this most recent election should tell you that. We need to better fund our schools, not get rid of them through some misguided free market exercise. People who think otherwise are those who can afford not to worry about the state of public education or whose ideology wins over anything.

To take a “let’s see what happens” approach with an experiment on public education is absolute madness. If it fails, it’s our kids we fail.