We Normalize the Small Stuff First
- Kelly Herron
- 6 days ago
- 7 min read
I was driving on I-75 in Oakland County this week when a hot pink billboard caught my eye. Bold white letters. A message from JewBelong, a nonprofit fighting antisemitism one highway at a time.
The billboard said: When you normalize antisemitism, someone attacks a preschool.
I had to sit with that for a while. Because the billboard isn’t wrong — but it skips some steps. Important ones. Steps that are exactly where people like you and me live every single day.
And right now, those steps matter more than ever. Last week, a man rammed his truck into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield — one of the largest synagogues in America — and set fire to the building where more than 100 children were in preschool. No children were hurt. But we should all be shaken. Because this didn’t come out of nowhere.
It never does.
The Billboard Missed the First Step
Antisemitism isn’t where it starts. It’s where it ends up — after a long, quiet road paved with smaller things. It starts with an eye roll. A dismissive comment that goes unchallenged at the dinner table. A joke that everybody laughs at because nobody wants to be the one who doesn’t. It starts with holding a grudge so long it calcifies into contempt. With treating people as obstacles instead of human beings. With choosing to look away when someone is struggling, because their pain feels inconvenient or too far away to matter.
It starts with indifference.
Elie Wiesel — Holocaust survivor, Nobel laureate, and one of the most important moral voices of the 20th century — said it plainly: “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.” He also said this: “What hurts the victim most is not the cruelty of the oppressor, but the silence of the bystander.”
The billboard starts at antisemitism. But we need to start earlier. We need to start at the eye roll.
Coaching question: What small act of dismissal or disregard have you let slide lately — not because you agreed, but because it was easier not to say anything?
The Person Who Picks Up the Brick
Here’s the part the billboard also skipped: the person who eventually acts out in violence is rarely someone who simply chose hate one day. More often, they are someone who was also dismissed. Also ignored. Also marginalized. Also told, in a thousand quiet ways, that their pain didn’t matter and their life was worth less.
Hate is not born in a vacuum. It finds a home in emptiness.
When a person has been wounded enough, when they have been unseen and unheard and unvalued for long enough, something cracks open. And what pours into that crack is whatever the world has been serving up. If the world has been serving up rage, dehumanization, and the idea that some lives matter less than others — that is what fills the space. It doesn’t feel good. But it feels like purpose. It feels like finally belonging to something, even if that something is ugly.
This is not an excuse. It is an explanation. And explanations are what allow us to interrupt cycles rather than just react to their explosions.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. understood this too. He didn’t just condemn the men who acted. He condemned the silence of the people who watched it build: “History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.”
The silence of the good people. That’s the brick that gets handed forward.
Jesus Wept
The shortest verse in the Bible is John 11:35. Two words: Jesus wept.
Jesus — who was himself a Jew, born into a Jewish family, raised in Jewish tradition, shaped by Jewish scripture — stood at the tomb of his friend Lazarus and wept. Not because he couldn’t fix it. But because grief is real and love demands that we feel it fully.
If Jesus stood in Oakland County today, I don’t think he’d be pointing at the billboard. I think he’d be weeping in the parking lot of Temple Israel. He’d be standing with the parents who had to pick up their preschoolers early that day. He’d be standing with the Muslim family who lost brothers to an airstrike, and then watched their son crack open under the weight of unprocessed grief and misdirected rage. He’d be weeping for all of it — because all of it is a catastrophic failure of human love.
Islam, Judaism, and Christianity are not enemies. They are family. They are the children of Abraham — three traditions born from the same father, the same promise, the same God who told one man to walk forward in faith and changed the world forever.
The artist collective CARAVAN commissioned three painters — one Muslim, one Jewish, one Christian — to create artwork together about the life of Abraham. Not to argue about who got the story right. But to paint what they share: a father who welcomed the stranger, loved fiercely, and trusted deeply. The result is breathtaking. Look it up. Put it somewhere you can see it.
Coaching question: If you believe all people are made in the image of something sacred — what does it cost you, personally, when you treat someone as less than that?
What Sister Mary Ellen Howard Knows
Sister Mary Ellen Howard is a Sisters of Mercy nun, a former public health nurse, and a longtime activist with the Detroit People’s Water Board. She has spent years showing up for people who were being told, quietly and systemically, that their basic needs didn’t matter.
She once described a baby shower held for at-risk mothers in Detroit. Staff asked the women what their biggest barriers were to caring for their newborns. They expected to hear things like transportation, jobs, childcare. Instead, the number one answer was this: they had no water to make formula for their babies. The city had shut it off. And the city refused to make exceptions — not for babies, not for the elderly, not for people on chemotherapy.
She said: “These things just make me want to scream. I can’t stand it. It doesn’t have to be that way.”
That is what systemic indifference looks like. Not a single dramatic act of cruelty. Just a thousand small decisions by people in power who chose policy over people. Who chose money over mercy. Who never had to feel the weight of what they were deciding because they would never go home to a house without water.
So What Do We Do?
The billboard is asking the right question in the wrong direction. It’s pointing at the fire when we need to be tracing where the kindling came from.
The fire at Temple Israel didn’t start last Thursday. It started in classrooms where difference was mocked and no teacher intervened. It started in comment sections where dehumanizing language became normalized. It started every time a system chose to ignore suffering because the suffering people were seen as less-than. It started every time a good person said nothing because saying something felt risky or uncomfortable or not their place.
We don’t stop violence by demanding that hateful people stop hating. That has never worked. You cannot shame someone into belonging. You cannot argue someone into feeling seen.
We stop it by deciding — ahead of time, before it’s hard — who we are going to be.
And part of that decision is this: we speak up in love. Not in superiority. Not with a list of everything someone has gotten wrong. We speak up in a way that leaves the door open — that says, you can come with us, you don’t have to stay there, there is room for you here.
Compassion crosses beliefs. It has to. Because the moment our care becomes conditional — the moment we only extend it to people who already agree with us — we have started the same fire we are trying to put out.
Speaking up doesn’t always mean confrontation. Sometimes it means sitting down next to someone and refusing to let them be alone in their worst thinking. It means disagreeing without disappearing. It means making it possible for people to change without having to first admit they were wrong in front of an audience.
We stop it by becoming the kind of people who say something at the dinner table — and say it in a way that invites rather than attacks. Who don’t laugh at the joke, but don’t walk out of the room either. Who show up for their neighbor even when the neighbor worships differently, looks different, votes differently, grieves differently.
“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.” — Elie Wiesel
“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” — Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
“It doesn’t have to be that way.” — Sister Mary Ellen Howard
And Jesus — a Jewish man who spent his whole life eating with people everyone else had written off — wept because he knew what it cost to love people well. And he did it anyway.
Coaching question: Who in your life, your workplace, or your community is quietly being treated as less-than — and what is one specific thing you could do this week to change that?
You Are Not a Billboard
The JewBelong campaign has a sign that says: “Can a billboard end antisemitism? No. But you’re not a billboard.”
They’re right about that part.
You are a person with a voice, a table, a workplace, a family, a community. You have influence that no highway sign ever will. And the small stuff — the daily choices about who you include, who you defend, who you see — that is where hate either gets normalized or gets interrupted.
It doesn’t start with profound violence. It starts with a random Tuesday.
What kind of Tuesday are you going to have?
Sources & Further Reading
• MLK, “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” Oberlin College, 1965
Sacrificial Love
Just as a circle embraces all that is within it, so does the Divine embrace all.No one has the power to divide this circle, to surpass it or to limit it.—Hildegard von Bingen
Comments