Maggie's Farm

From the piece by Dorian Abbott: 

Freedom isn’t free. And what’s being asked of most of us is, in the grand scheme of things, relatively minor. You might lose a grad student, some colleagues might be mean to you, maybe it will be harder to get certain grants, maybe you will even lose your job—but probably nothing will happen to you that would particularly impress Solzhenitsyn. One exercise that might help is to play out in your mind all of the negative scenarios you can imagine and show yourself that you can survive them. Even in the worst-case scenario, you will probably still be better off than 99 percent of the world’s population.

Not all of us are willing or able to take on this fight. And even those of us who are ready to act need to choose our battles wisely, and not go charging into every fray like a mad berserker. In my own case, I spent years remaining silent and hoping the problem would just go away on its own. Eventually, I realized that the problem was getting worse rather than better, so I spoke up in the most considered way I could. And even then, I was still targeted for a cancellation attack.