The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.1
-Martin Luther King, Jr., “On Being a Good Neighbor”
Over the past year, I’ve been writing about gratitude and the recognition of one’s own interdependence with others as foundations for healthy manhood. Today, I want to explore how these foundations call us to act in solidarity with people who are being hurt—and how doing so is a form of teaching.
To begin, I want to expand on a theme from something I wrote back in February 2023, when I reflected on how the silence and inaction of bystanders—friends, classmates, teachers, administrators—helped define my middle-school experience of being bullied.
I wrote then:
I experienced [the bystanders’] silence as allowance, as tacit support of the bullying. Their inaction sustained a veneer of apparent consensus that the bullying was OK, that the bystanders were prepared to accept my pain.
As an adult, more than 30 years later, I’m wise enough to understand that sometimes people disagree with harmful behavior but stay silent out of fear. Looking back, it’s possible that most of the bystanders to my bullying struggled internally with what was happening but held back, fearful of what abuse might be directed toward them—fearful, perhaps, of the other silent bystanders.
But I could not perceive any such nuance as a bullied middle schooler. The internal resistance of the bystanders, if it existed, was not made public, and this withholding taught its own lesson: this is no safe harbor here.2
In other words, bystanders are teachers. And when bystanders choose silence and the path of least resistance, they teach at least three damaging and false lessons:
The person being hurt learns that no one in that community is going to show up for them.
Each bystander to that hurt also learns that no one will show up for the victim—nor for the bystander, if the bystander were to take the risk to intervene.
The person who inflicts harm learns how much power the community was willing to hand over to them.
These are terrible, miseducative moral lessons, and they define what the late sociologist Allen G. Johnson called the “the fabric of collusion and apparent consensus.”3 When no one resists, hurtful relations achieve an air of inevitability. But this “inevitability” is a product of inaction, not a durable truth of the situation.
Today, as an adult in my late 40’s, I’m able to imagine the bystanders to my bullying with more generosity than I could as an adolescent. I can imagine the flood of discomfort through their bodies. I can imagine their worry that similar bullying would be directed toward them if they spoke up. I can imagine them glancing furtively at their peers and, seeing no action to help me, choosing to keep quiet.
But the fact that inaction is understandable does not make it right or relieve our collective responsibility for the world that we create together.
I ask you to imagine a different response.
Imagine a bystander who, though scared upon seeing the suffering of another, also intuits how their own freedom is inextricably bound up with the freedom of the suffering person. Imagine that the bystander is moved by this call of conscience and, rejecting the supposed “inevitability” of the suffering before them, takes the risk to help. In doing so, this person changes the situation and the lessons that it teaches, and other bystanders discover greater strength and freedom to live out their values, too.
That’s because action grounded in connection that lifts up the wounded, though risky, pierces the veil of apparent consensus and inevitability. As Johnson writes,
the simplest way to help others make different choices is to make them myself, and to do it openly so they can see what I am doing. As I shift the patterns of my own participation . . . I make it easier for others to do so as well—and harder for them not to.4
Taking responsibility for our interdependence with others means learning to notice those moments when we are tempted to follow the path of least resistance. It means assessing, in the moment, the power and resources we have for pushing a hurtful situation off its axis, so that the people who inhabit that situation may live in greater safety and dignity.
In some situations, you will have considerable power to speak up for others. For example, perhaps you are well-known within an institution, like your kids’ school or your family’s church, as someone who shows up and tends to the health of the people within it. If so, this gives you privileged standing from which to act.
In other situations, speaking up may be risky for you. If so, you, too, deserve the opportunity to take refuge in the helpful action of others. In a healthy community, you can count on it.
When we take helpful action in view of others, we teach at least four lessons:
Victims of hurtful power learn that safe harbor does, in fact, exist. These relationships can be cultivated.
The active bystander who speaks up (i.e., the “upstander”) learns about their own capacity for resilience and courage on behalf of others. They witness their own impact and experience the resonance and deep gratitude that comes from aligning action with values.
Other bystanders learn that speaking up is possible. They can take greater courage, knowing they will not be alone is doing so. And they will have a harder time looking away from hurtful power in the future, because memory and conscience will remind them of what is possible.
Exercisers of hurtful power learn that their capacity to do as they please is constrained by an interconnected and resilient community of care. If the perpetrator cares about also being part of that community, this recognition of a limit to power can open a door to accountability and a moral turn.
When we take helpful action, we teach others—and ourselves—that care and welcome can persist and thrive even in painful conditions. Our action changes the meaning of the situation, and the renewed situation changes us in turn. The capacity of conscience to scrape noisily against the temptation to “go along” deepens. The conscience cries out, with growing power: “do not turn away.” Courage invites courage. Over time, as former victims, former bystanders, and (hopefully) former perpetrators learn to move and act together, they become a community of care upon which all can depend, for which all can be grateful.
When we take the risk to live in full mindfulness of our mutual interdependence and stand with others in welcome and solidarity, we become the best kind of teachers.
Martin Luther King, Jr., “On Being a Good Neighbor,” in Strength To Love, Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1963/2010, pg. 26.
Matthew S. Rosin, “The Power of Bystanders,” February 18, 2023, https://fatherhoodislearning.substack.com/p/the-power-of-bystanders.
Allan G. Johnson, The Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy, Third Edition, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2014, pg. 232.
Ibid., pg. 233.