Show the Hand of Grace or Punch a Nazi?
Frustratingly, we are gonna need both.
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Now for something more serious. Or less. I’m not sure.
Show the Hand of Grace or Punch a Nazi?
You’re walking down the street. It’s 2025. There’s a man in an undistinguishable uniform dragging a child away from her family at a bus stop. What do you do?
A. Ask him nicely to stop.
B. Take a swing at him.
C. Pull out your phone and livestream it like a good little citizen-journalist.
D. Write your congressperson and wait three to five business years.
E. All of the above.
We are taught as individuals, by gentle parents and good schools and eager churches, that violence is never the answer. But what if you're up against people whose whole job is violence? What if the guy dragging that child away has an American flag pin, a gun, and the full support of the State? What if the law is utterly immoral?
Some of you, at this point, will quote Jesus or Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. who said, "Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that." You’ll say, “See? MLK didn’t punch anybody!”
And some of you will say Malcolm X had the right idea with "by any means necessary," because the only language power understands is force.
The trouble is, both of you are right.
The False Binary of Civil Rights
Let’s get one thing straight: Martin Luther King Jr. was not a passive teddy bear singing hymns while getting hosed down in the street. The man was radical. He disrupted the social order. He was arrested 29 times. The FBI blackmailed him to try and get him to kill himself. Nonviolence doesn’t mean the absence of physical resistance.
And Malcolm? People love to quote that “by any means necessary” line like he was gunning for a fight every Tuesday afternoon. But Malcolm X wasn’t about reckless violence. He was about dignity. He was about defending Black life when the cops wouldn’t in the face of the Klan. (As if they two were different ). He was eloquent, sharp, and strategic.
So don’t fall for the cartoon versions of these men. Don’t choose one over the other like you’re at a Civil Rights theme park gift shop. We need Martin’s vision and Malcolm’s spine. And vice versa. There is need for both.
Kindness is No Exemption From Direct Action
Kindness is not an optional value, friends. It's the WD-40 of human civilization. Without it, everything squeaks, seizes up, and eventually explodes in a ball of smoke and unpaid therapy bills. When you’re talking to your uncle who thinks climate change is a Chinese hoax and the moon landing was filmed on a soundstage in New Jersey, you don’t start with a flamethrower. You start with a joke. You remember that he once taught you how to fish or drive stick shift or how it's okay to cry when the dog died. You begin there—not because he’s right, but because he’s still human. If we can’t recognize the humanity in people we disagree with, then congratulations, we’ve become the fascists we were trying to stop.
But—and here’s the big ol’ cosmic “but” hanging over us like a fart in a elevator—when someone moves from bad opinions to bad actions, when they go from saying awful things to doing the unthinkable, like shoving people into ICE vans, then yes, you stop them. You get in the way. You make noise. You throw your body on the gears. You take a swing. Not because you hate them, but because you love the people they’re hurting. This is a human dilemma that has plagued every single society in the history of our species. Unfortunately, you are not going to be able to skip this one. Your sweet nature does not exempt you.
Just War Theory and the Tooth Fairy
Seeing as we are talking about non-violence, I'm sure there is someone in the back of the class raising their hand and saying, “What about Just War Theory?”
That’s the Catholic idea that war can be moral if it meets certain conditions: Just cause. Right intention. Last resort. Proportionality. All that jazz. It’s very clean. Academic. It feels like seriousness, but is really nothing of the sort.
Just War Theory doesn’t help you much when your war is not a war but a slow, grinding system of oppression. ICE doesn’t wear red coats and march in formation. They wear windbreakers and drive SUVs. Fascism today doesn’t come goose-stepping down Main Street. There’s no battlefield, so there’s no declaration of war. There’s no Geneva Convention for evictions, border walls, or police stops that end in death.
Augustine invented Just War Theory, which should be a red flag right there, as he also thought babies were born damned. So we can toss it into the recycling bin with the idea that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” That arc only bends if you pull on it like hell.
Pacifism Isn’t Passive
There’s another idea out there, call it boutique pacifism, where you stand on the sidewalk with a sign that says “No Hate!” while tanks roll by. It’s very polite. Very Instagrammable.
But hate and rage and anger are not to be tossed away in the quest for personal wellness and positive vibrational alignment. Or whatever. They are useful. More than that: they are essential.
Real pacifism needs them, because it is confrontational. It’s putting your body in front of the bulldozer. It’s Rosa Parks sitting when she was told to stand. It’s the Standing Rock water protectors holding the line against militarized police.
It’s not weak. It’s brave.
Because rarely are you facing a fascist. Usually you are living under them.
Your Conscience is the Thing
There’s no user manual for morality. Sorry. God didn’t leave an FAQ. But somewhere in your guts—or your soul, if you still believe in that kind of thing—there’s a compass. And when you see evil, it starts to twitch.
Not all evils are equal. Punching a Nazi in the face is not the same as putting a kid in a cage. Shouting down a white supremacist is not the same as lynching someone. Property damage is not genocide. Don't let bad-faith arguments equate them.
You don’t get to outsource your conscience to laws, politicians, or TikToks. You have to decide.
So here’s a question that should mess you up:
If the guy in the uniform worked for a foreign regime (if he were Chinese or Russian or Iranian) what would you do?
Do that.
Yes, But…
Someone, possibly you, possibly the part of you that still believes in freshman-year Ethics 101 or Buddhism or Montessori-style conflict resolution, says: “Bro. Doesn’t violence, like, inevitably just beget more violence?”
And OK, yes. Absolutely yes. Except also: inaction does that too. In fact, inaction might be the more insidious begetter, because it begets in quiet. Inaction sits politely with its hands folded while things fall apart. While people fall apart. While actual bodies are removed from homes or herded like livestock under a fluoride-bright hum of detention center fluorescents. A huge problem is that most of us have confused civility with morality.
History is full of people who “waited for the right moment” while others were dragged away. And when the moment came, if it ever did, it was too late. There’s a time for turning the other cheek. There’s also a time for breaking the jaw of an oppressor. If you're confused, that means you're still human. If you're certain, you're probably either dangerous or useless.
Now, imagine that you meet a Nazi. Not a tax-curmudgeon uncle or a Facebook libertarian or someone who once said the word “globalists” in a weird tone. No. An actual Nazi. Like, full regalia. Skull iconography. A fetish for boots. Shouting anti-semitism and racism. What do you do? Do you show grace, like literal non-sarcastic “turn the other cheek” grace? Or do you punch him in the face?
And here’s the part that will enrage absolutists: it depends.
Because maybe, just maybe, grace breaks the script. Maybe an act of kindness punctures his performance. Or maybe it lets him continue. Maybe the punch is necessary. Not cathartic, not heroic. Just necessary, like a vaccine that hurts but prevents something worse. But also: maybe it makes you into something you hate. There is, maddeningly, no clear answer. Morality is not a vending machine. You don’t insert principle and receive justice. You improvise. You try not to become the villain while fighting the villain.
And still, the question isn’t primarily about him. It’s about everyone else. The people he would hurt. The people already hurt. The children who hide when a man with a Kevlar vest knocks on the door. Your moral calculations begin with them. If they don’t, you’re not calculating morality. You’re just stroking your own ethical ego.
So here’s the messed-up, postmodern, irritatingly dialectical conclusion:
We need both.
We need the monks who kneel in the street and the ones who stand in the way. We need the daughters who still love their fathers after voting wrong. We need the sons who throw their bodies between fascists and the future.
Grace is still the go-to move for your neighbor and the person you still hope to reach. Resistance is for the system. Your neighbor might be redeemable. The system rarely is.
If you can, extend a hand. But keep the other ready to be clenched.
Sometimes, the only moral action is to interfere. To be inconvenient. To ruin the nice afternoon.
And if, in that moment, that means punching a Nazi...
Then God help us, maybe that is grace too.
POEM OF THE WEEK: A Woman Speaks by Audre Lorde
Until next week - Be Excellent To Each Other 🤘 dg
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