Go See For Yourself

There is a moment I have gotten used to.

Somebody in Oklahoma asks what I have been working on, and I tell them I am writing a book about people who quietly take care of other people. Lovely, they say. Then they ask who, and somewhere in the list I say the Satanic Temple, and I watch their whole face reorganize itself.

You did what.

I have started collecting those faces the way I collect everything else on this project. They are useful. They tell me exactly where the line is that the book is trying to walk across.

Here is what I will say about the two people behind that particular door, without spending the chapter. They do not believe in Satan. They will tell you that in the first five minutes, a little wearily, because they have said it ten thousand times. They spent a good part of last year raising money for food banks, hauling a disabled member’s furniture into a new apartment, and covering two months of rent for someone who lost his job and was too embarrassed to ask.

That is the whole reveal, and it is not much of one. It is only surprising because of what we did with the name before we got there.

I want to be careful about the position I am writing from, because I do not think I am the neutral party in this.

I live in Oklahoma. I have spent more than a decade in a spiritual practice that does not match the county I live in, which means I have some small experience of being the item on somebody’s list that makes their face do the thing. It is a mild version. Nobody has ever lost a job over mine. But it is enough that I recognize the expression from both sides of it, and I think that recognition is most of what qualifies me to do this work at all.

Years ago I took my daughter to a protest, and then went back by myself that night, and stood near the front for a long time not saying anything. Something happened there that I am still deciding how to write about. What I took away from it was narrower than a political conclusion. It was that I had spent a fair amount of energy having opinions about a thing I had never actually stood inside of, and that standing inside of it for three hours taught me more than a year of reading had.

That is not a sophisticated method. It is barely a method. But it has become the closest thing I have to a working creed, and it goes something like this.

Not everybody can be loud all the time. Some people are carrying things that make being loud expensive. So rather than argue about who is right, go to the place, and see the thing for yourself, and then decide.

The going is the part people skip. It is genuinely inconvenient. It costs gas money and vacation days and a certain amount of sitting in rooms where you are the outsider and nobody is particularly interested in making you comfortable. It is much cheaper to form the opinion from here.

What I have found, over and over, is that the distance between what I expected and what was actually there is almost never small. It is not that I was slightly off. It is that I had the wrong shape entirely. And the correction never came from an argument. It came from an afternoon.

I am not going to pretend this resolves neatly. There are people I have sat with whose politics I find hard, and sitting with them did not convert either of us. That is not the point and I would not want it to be. What changed was smaller and harder to argue with: I could no longer hold the cartoon version, because I had watched the person make coffee.

The question I keep turning over is whether that scales. I can go sit in a gymnasium in Sand Springs. I cannot go sit with everyone. Most of what any of us know about most people, we will always know from a distance, filtered through somebody with an incentive.

So maybe the practice is not go see everything. Maybe it is just: notice when you are about to decide something about a whole category of person from across the room, and hold the verdict a little longer than is comfortable.

That is most of what this book is. A stack of held verdicts.

Resonance: The Quiet Revolution of Compassion is out November 10, 2026 from Akiiki Press.