Speaking Frogsense
On contemplating the quiet strength of absurd, peaceful protest
Some of the strongest protests I’ve seen or read about didn’t look like protests at all.
They looked like singing. Or walking. Or handing a flower to a man holding a weapon.
Calm. Absurd. Even funny at times. But not naïve.
There’s a certain kind of power in people who stay steady when others are baiting them to break.
We live in a time when outrage is rewarded. The louder you get, the more attention you draw.
But clarity isn’t loud. It’s sharp. It cuts through confusion by refusing to join it.
Calm doesn’t mean compliant — it means knowing when to move, and how, from a wider lens.
History keeps showing us this kind of strength.
Gandhi’s marchers didn’t shout back — they advanced.
Civil rights leaders met hate with hymns, not silence but steady rhythm.
Students in Prague held mirrors to soldiers so they’d see their own reflection behind the mask of authority.
These weren’t gestures of surrender; they were precision strikes of humanity.
“Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice.”
— Martin Luther King Jr.
The absurd works because it throws power off balance. It breaks the pattern. A clown handing a flower to a soldier. Protesters in Belarus dancing in dinosaur costumes. Americans at the 2017 Women’s March wearing knitted pink “pussy hats” — intentionally absurd, deliberately disarming — each of these acts refuses to meet aggression on its terms. They expose how absurd the machinery of violence already is.
“The artist’s struggle is precisely against the attempt to replace the imagination with power.”
— James Baldwin
Asheville, NC | No Kings Protest | Photo by Troy Winterrowd
That’s what the frog reminds me of — not the tired metaphor about boiling slowly to death, but the opposite.
The frog as I see it is alert and irreverent.
It survives by sensing the shift and moving with it.
Awareness is its strength.
In heated times, that’s the kind of intelligence we need — the kind that stays cool enough to see clearly, even as the water rises.
Absurd protest isn’t about softening reality; it’s about changing its chemistry.
It widens the field beyond for or against and invites imagination back into the equation.
It reminds us there are more than two ways to resist — and that composure itself can be confrontational when the world expects fury.
The Portland frog, to me, has always carried some of that West Coast spirit I once lived inside —
a kind of irreverent freedom, unafraid of the unusual, alert enough to sense when the pattern needs to be broken.
Violence feeds the system it resists. It plays by its rules.
But humor, grace, and calm refuse those terms.
They make fear show its seams.
They hold up a mirror that says: We see you. We’re not playing that game anymore.
Maybe that’s what this moment is asking of us — not a harder strike, but a steadier hand.
The courage to see clearly, to act deliberately, to stay human while the heat rises.
For frogs’ sake, maybe that’s the revolution now:
less fury, more focus.
less noise, more nerve.
An unflappable kind of revolution — steady, smiling, unboiled.
“What if joy is not a feeling but a force — and its purpose is to keep us from becoming what we are fighting?”
— Ross Gay
I’ll admit — as someone who leans naturally introverted and inward — I’ve often struggled to understand this kind of protest in my body before my mind. Writing this is my way of connecting with it.
Author’s Note
This piece continues a thread I began in my earlier essay Here Hear, where I explored the quiet intelligence of peaceful protest. This time, I wanted to look more closely at the power of the absurd — not as comedy or escape, but as precision, as awareness, and as a way of holding up a mirror that exposes what violence can’t understand.
