sleeping giants

The sleeping giant is one name for the public, when it wakes up, when we wake up, we are no longer only the public: we are civil society, the superpower whose nonviolent means are sometimes, for a shining moment, more powerful than violence, more powerful than regimes and armies. We write history with our feet and with our presence and our collective voice and vision. And yet, of course, everything in the mainstream media suggest that popular resistace is ridiculous, pointless, or criminal, unless it is far away, was long ago, or, ideally, both. These are the forces that prefer the giant remains asleep. 

- Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit (Foreword to the 3rd Edition, 2015)