Moral courage is not primarily the heroic act — the whistleblower, the resistor — but the ordinary accumulation of small decisions in which what is right and what is comfortable diverge, and something in us has to choose. It is the willingness to say something true that will be unwelcome, to stand by a person who is being diminished, to refuse the small collusions that institutions and social groups routinely invite. Juana's extraordinary courage was built from the same material as this everyday version: the repeated decision to let what you know to be true matter more than what it costs to say it.
Juana