100,000 or more protest through rain across Sydney’s harbour bridge. It’s a potent symbol. A collective show of anger and dismay.
Later in the week a woman, perhaps in her seventies, sits quietly alone on the steps of Melbourne’s parliament between two signs that read ‘Gaza is starving’. It feels as powerful. A moral vigil, perhaps drawn from that desperate inner sense so many must share now: what can I do; it will achieve nothing, but I must do something. “I can't go on. I'll go on.”
What shifts through a quiet assertion of sympathy and fellow human feeling? The Gaza starvation, killings and devastation are a manifestation of profoundly malignant intent. To sit quietly in opposition to all of that is to stand for kindness, and simple humanity. The gesture might not change the course of those distant and dreadful events, but it asserts the better human self. That’s a thing to see, and might be the beginning of anything.