Every week for two years, the same small group stood silently in the town square holding handmade signs that said only three words: Stop the war.
People walking by sometimes asked the obvious question. "Don't you get tired of saying something so simple, over and over, when nothing seems to change?"
Old Senhor Bahnsen, who organized the vigil and had been doing it longer than anyone could remember, always gave the same answer. "Of course I get tired. The exhaustion is not the question, though. The question is whether the thing we're asking for has stopped being true. It hasn't. The war hasn't stopped. So the sign stays the same, however tired my arms get holding it up."
"Doesn't it feel pointless, saying the same three words week after week?"
"It would feel pointless if the demand were complicated," he said. "But this isn't complicated. It never needed to be. Some demands deserve elaborate arguments and careful diplomacy. This one is simple enough that repeating it, plainly, again and again, is itself the whole point. The moment we start dressing it up in more sophisticated language, we risk making it sound negotiable. It isn't."
A young volunteer, new to the vigil, asked him once what kept him standing there, week after unrewarded week.
"The fact that it should not need to be said even once," he answered. "And the fact that it is still being said, every week, somewhere, by someone, until it finally isn't necessary anymore. I don't know if my sign will be the one that changes anything. But I know that the silence of not holding it would change nothing for certain."
He held the sign every week until the day he died, three simple words, repeated without complication, exactly as necessary at the end as at the beginning.
Some demands are too important to be made complicated. The most radical thing we can sometimes do is keep saying the simplest, truest thing — plainly, patiently, for as long as it takes to finally be heard.
