But What Can I Do?

How ordinary actions create extraordinary ripples.

Photo by Koen Emmers on Unsplash

What difference can one person make?

These days we’re experiencing wave after wave of upsetting news from our government’s administration.

Just this last week: Cutting funds to FEMA, deporting a legal resident to an El Salvador prison without due process, watching my retirement savings take a nosedive thanks to the President’s tariffs.

It’s all so much, and with so much speed, and nowhere to turn, stunned inertia feels like the safest response.

I mean, I’m just one person, right?

Actions that I could take—like writing to my Congress reps who never ever answer (though their newsletters cheerily ask me if I want a response)—don’t feel effective nor enough.

As though I’m not heard.

Tempting me to think my opinions don’t matter.

Yet, choosing to be a bystander doesn’t feel good either. It’s why I joined millions of others who turned out for the Hands-Off demonstrations.

It felt like something.

This got me thinking about historical people out of the limelight who made a difference through an inspired action. [You think I’m going to grab the mic to talk about Jo, right? For those new to this newsletter, I frequently reference Jo van Gogh in my weekly essays since I’ve written a book about her. BTW, Pub Day is next week!]

Yes, Jo’s life fits the trailblazer mold because she stood up for Vincent van Gogh when he was on track to be forgotten. But today, I’m turning my attention to three other people.

Out-of-the-public eye.

Small inspired actions.

Yet, sonic-boom-level, global ripple effect because they listened to their intuition.

Miep Gies Found Anne Frank’s Diary

During the German occupation of Holland in WWII, Miep Gies was one of the many non-Jewish helpers who hid Jewish people from being kidnapped and sent to concentration camps by the Nazis. For two years Gies sourced and delivered food to Anne Frank and her family, the van Pels family and a dentist who all hid in a secret annex at Otto Frank’s business.

In August 1944 the eight in hiding were betrayed and captured. After they left Gies went back to the annex and discovered the notebooks Anne had kept to record her thoughts.

A year later, Anne and her sister Margot died of typhus in Belsen a few weeks before the war ended. When Gies discovered that the only survivor from the original eight was Anne’s father Otto, she delivered the diaries to him. He was stunned to read his daughter’s thoughts—the hopes and dreams for her life ahead—heartbreakingly capturing and so humanizing the loss of millions of lives from the Holocaust. He effectively spent the rest of his life sharing her story.

Miep Gies not only helped a family survive, but by saving and delivering the diaries she enabled the diary’s poignant message to be heard by future generations.

Joshua Speed Protected Abe Lincoln

Then there’s Joshua Speed, Abraham Lincoln’s roommate for three years when Lincoln lived in Springfield, Illinois, working as a country lawyer. In the winter of 1840-41, Lincoln had decided to end his engagement to Mary Todd but then became deeply depressed, and according to Speed his friend went crazy.

Speed had planned to leave Springfield, and return home following his father’s death, but instead stayed for Lincoln. He cleared razors and knives from Lincoln’s bedroom and told his thirty-one-year-old buddy to pull it together or else he would surely die.

Lincoln replied, he wouldn’t mind dying if he had done anything he could be remembered for.

Though the men had different political views, they remained friends throughout their lives. Twenty years later Lincoln would look back and remind Speed of the conversation, saying he hoped the Emancipation Proclamation was the act he’d lived for.

Speed was in the right place at the right time to come to the aid of one of the most revered Presidents in American history.

Anne Sullivan Macy Gives Helen Keller a Voice

The third example is Anne Sullivan Macy, the twenty-one-year-old teacher who taught a wild blind, deaf and mute six-year-old girl, Helen Keller, to communicate with manual “fingerspelling.”

As a child, Macy had gone blind due to untreated trachoma. She lived in an abusive family situation, ultimately being abandoned and sent to a state poorhouse. At fourteen, she begged to be sent to Boston’s Perkins Institute for the Blind, where several eye surgeries restored some sight, and she learned the fingerspelling technique.

Upon graduation as valedictorian, her first job was to attempt to teach Helen. The climactic scene when Macy has a breakthrough in communicating with Helen is captured in the 1962 film The Miracle Worker. In it, Macy pours cold water on Helen’s hand and then spells W-A-T-E-R. Later Macy would write, “She [Helen] dropped the mug and stood as if transfixed. A new light came into her face.”

Helen Keller would go on to become the first deaf and blind person in the United States to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. She would become a writer, lecturer and activist for the disabled, raising funds for the American Foundation for the Blind and demonstrating how she did not allow a disability to define her. All with Macy at her side.

Miep Gies, Joshua Speed and Anne Sullivan Macy.

Regular people. I mean, zero political clout, no fame, no outsized anything, yet they each made a difference.

Get Individual Voices Together and Wow

I know several people who have recently chosen to become gluten-free. Through them, it’s been really wild to discover how many gluten-free choices there are these days in grocery stores and restaurants.

Being GF is normalized!

Same with free-range meat in mainstream supermarkets. It’s everywhere; yet it feels like it wasn’t that long ago that factory-farmed meat was the only choice.

Why the changes? Because a steady flow of people asked for them. Each individual’s voice added to a chorus that grew so loud the minority became significant.

Each voice mattered because it added to the whole.

Yes, I know it sounds like I’m writing a bumper sticker but I’m gonna say it anyway.

You may be just one person.

But that’s enough.

Warmly,