Silence is Not Violence (August 2025)

The other day my wife and I were pushing our baby in a stroller through a group of protestors in Santa Cruz, California. The group looked mostly elderly, middle or upper class, and while there wasn't a consistent message, the signs were generally pro-left and anti-Trump, which made sense given the area is predominantly liberal.

One woman was holding a sign that said, "Silence is Violence" and I was surprised that it pissed me off. I thought maybe it was because I was already on edge due to the protestors yelling, which was upsetting our baby and distracting drivers as we were crossing the street.

A few days later, it hit me that maybe what pissed me off wasn't the commotion but the realization that the "Silence is Violence" meme has gone from something that was once helpful and well-intentioned to a rationalization for increasingly annoying and unproductive behavior.

The way I understood "Silence is Violence" when I first heard it was that inaction in the face of injustice makes you complicit. However, the important thing is the action - actually stopping something bad - not the saying something.

I wondered if the protestors were simply forgetting the obvious - that protesting isn't productive in and of itself. The point is to cause change, which if you put a gun to my head, I'd bet liberal people protesting liberal causes in a liberal town with a disorganized message is unlikely to accomplish. What happened to the days of protesting in front of the people you disagree with?

Then I wondered if I wasn't giving them enough credit. Maybe protesting, not change, was actually the point. When I thought back on the protest, I remembered people taking selfies, laughing, and having fun. The vibe felt more like a party aimed at getting validation via honks from passerby than what I imagine the Million Man March must have felt like. Then it hit me, what pissed me off wasn't that people seemed to misunderstand the whole "Silence is Violence" thing, it was because this was the boomer version of social media virtue signaling.

I quit social media and nearly all news a while back because I was more or less addicted to it and it was making me a less happy, present, and productive person. When the topic comes up, the main criticism I get is that I'm not fulfilling my duty of being an informed citizen. This is another misunderstanding of an outdated meme. In 2025, when information is abundant, as opposed to most of history when it was scarce, I'd prefer to limit my attention to a few things I can act on as opposed to bombarding myself negative information I can do little about.

On the surface, there's nothing wrong with holding signs or reposting political content on social media. It's a free country. But if your goal is to help change the things you perport to care about, I doubt that endlessly reposting or yelling consensus opinions into a bubble is the best way to do it. It might be making things worse by causing people to see that you're misappropriating causes for your own gain, which minimizes and distracts from their importance.

It's as if people weren't calling 911 when someone was hurt so a meme circulated that "not calling 911 is violence" to increase reporting. Then social media got invented and the meme spread so far that eventually thousands of people were crowding around any injured person to take selfies as they called 911, only to overwhelm the emergency response phone lines, preventing legitimate calls from getting through and hindering the ability of paramedics to reach victims. Then another group of people noticed the absurdity of this trend and started a meme that "calling 911 is bad" and decided to never call 911, even when it was desperately needed.

Advocacy can be productive just like calling 911 can be productive, but most people like to do what's easy and feels good. Changing the status quo usually requires sacrifice and discomfort, which might mean speaking up about a topic your friends disagree with you about or actively listening to people you disagree with or volunteering precious weekend hours or donating hard-earned money or spending years becoming an expert on a topic. And if you just want to have fun or need validation, hopefully you have people in your life that you can ask for it from directly, without requiring a veneer of virtue.

This is all so obvious but everywhere I look people are espousing noble causes in exchange for cheap dopamine, in large part because we continue to give it to them. We can keep criticizing when it's the other team and validating when it's our team, but it's reaching a level where I worry it's hurting more than helping. Perhaps, in 2025, we could all use a little bit more silence. Fortunately, you can log off social media and it mostly all disappears, at least until someone shoves a stupid sign in your face.