The funny thing is, goodness is hard to write about. Authors don’t often attempt it, and those who do often fail.

Take Shakespeare. He could summon up great storms of dramatic action about heroic virtue; the glittering moral courage of Coriolanus or Henry V thrill audiences to this day. His villains, too, are timeless and still spellbinding: Iago, Lady Macbeth, Richard III. Shakespeare perhaps did villainy better than bravery. It’s more fun, isn’t it?

But the ordinary decencies that hold life together—neighborliness, charity, empathy, marital happiness—they are mostly absent in Shakespeare’s plays, and when they aren’t, they seem to drain the dramatic energy from the stage. Drama thrives on conflict; goodness is static. For a moment at the beginning of The Tempest, Miranda is a breathtaking embodiment of innocence: “O brave new world, / That has such people in’t!” After that, she’s kind of a buzzkill.

Am I wrong? Who are some of your favorite “good characters” in fiction, movies or theater? Let me know in the comments.

Last year, I read a short novel that accomplishes the very difficult trick of making goodness heart-stoppingly dramatic. It’s called Small Things Like These, and it’s by the Irish author Claire Keegan. (The movie version stars Cillian Murphy.) When I finished the book, in tears, I realized that Claire Keegan had taken on in a few pages one of the greatest and most difficult subjects, and succeeded in bringing it to vivid fictional life: The mystery of goodness.

I’ve been thinking about this subject for a few days, since I returned home from a trip to Chicago.

I went to Chicago to see for myself—and to document—what is happening in the city where I was born. Right now, Chicago feels decisive to me. The irresistible force of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown and authoritarian ambitions is meeting the unmovable object of a city of 2.7 million proud, tough, fiercely independent Chicagoans, the substantial majority of whom oppose Trump’s aggression.

I had been seeing, from various news sources and across social media, the clashes between protestors and federal forces in Chicago. There are critical court battles going on, which I have been following closely. And, of course, we have all seen the many videos of brutal arrests and callous use of force by federal agents carrying out Trump’s orders.

All of that became part of our 30-minute mini-doc, “Field Report: Life Under the Immigration Crackdown.” But there’s more to the story, something I’d noticed in all the frenzy of the news. It’s the story beyond the headlines, the story I really wanted to tell.

Call it, “The Revolt of the Normies.”

Every protest movement—like the rising up of people across our country who are opposing Trump’s policies and his drive toward authoritarianism—needs igniters. People who are the first to get out in the streets and get up in the town meetings. They lead the way. Often, and it is no criticism of them to say it, they’ve done it before, maybe a lot. They’re wired that way, with a natural extroversion and civic enthusiasm that cannot be contained or intimidated out of them.

Over the years, I’ve covered scores of protests, and talked with the leaders and the instigators up at the front. But I always knew when a protest signaled a major shift in the public mind and heart; it was when I’d be moving through the crowd, reporting on the scene, and I’d hear lots of people say something to me like, “You know, I’ve never done this before.”

That’s what’s happening in Chicago. And it is so moving.

Moms coming out by the hundreds to stand watch outside schools as the children are dismissed and blowing their whistles to warn when ICE is near. Bystanders in quiet neighborhoods, seeing an arrest and taking out their phones to shoot video of the incident, thereby getting on the record not just the conduct of the federal agents, but also the desperate cries of the people being arrested, who will often call out their names before they are taken. Hundreds of Catholics processing to an ICE detention center, singing and praying so those inside can hear them, maybe pray with them, at least know they are not alone.

Donald Trump has roused the normies in Chicago, and as the No Kings protests have shown, across the country, too. In America, that still matters. Most Americans, despite Trump’s ferocious efforts (and despite the secretive efforts of both our enemies overseas and our enemies in the c-suites of the big social media corporations), are still normal, decent people. Yes, many can be corrupted or intimidated into submission to Trump’s designs. But most can’t. They are slow to action. But you don’t want to be in their way when they move.

Solidarity is so powerful. When it takes hold of the hearts of millions, it harnesses the best of us, the goodness in us, to force change.

I keep thinking about something Gabe Gonzales said to me in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago. Gabe helped set up a group that is out on the streets every day in Rogers Park, protecting the neighborhood. It was just something he felt he had to do.

I asked Gabe if, given the increasingly clear authoritarian nature of the Trump administration, he was concerned for his own security.

Gabe Gonzales is a good man, a good neighbor.

Our poem this week captures some of the mystery of goodness, and how our broken politics needs us to rise to it.

It’s called “Dead Stars,” and it’s by Ada Limon, the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States, the first Latina to hold that position. Limon, who is of Mexican-American descent, begins this poem describing that most ordinary task—taking out the trash at night, in winter—and ends with a rising to goodness that reaches the heavens.

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Out here, there’s a bowing even the trees are doing. Winter’s icy hand at the back of all of us.Black bark, slick yellow leaves, a kind of stillness that feels so mute it’s almost in another year.

I am a hearth of spiders these days: a nest of trying.

We point out the stars that make Orion as we take out the trash, the rolling containers a song of suburban thunder.

It’s almost romantic as we adjust the waxy blue recycling bin until you say, Man, we should really learnsome new constellations.

And it’s true. We keep forgetting about Antlia, Centaurus, Draco, Lacerta, Hydra, Lyra, Lynx.

But mostly we’re forgetting we’re dead stars too, my mouth is full of dust and I wish to reclaim the rising—

to lean in the spotlight of streetlight with you, toward what’s larger within us, toward how we were born.

Look, we are not unspectacular things. We’ve come this far, survived this much. What

would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?

What if we stood up with our synapses and flesh and said, No. No, to the rising tides.

Stood for the many mute mouths of the sea, of the land?

What would happen if we used our bodies to bargain

for the safety of others, for earth, if we declared a clean night, if we stopped being terrified,

if we launched our demands into the sky, made ourselves so bigpeople could point to us with the arrows they make in their minds,

rolling their trash bins out, after all of this is over?