Last night, on Chris Hayes’s show, I learned about Sarah Inama, who teaches 6th grade in Idaho, and has a poster on her wall that says, “Everyone is welcome here.” Inama’s school administration told her to take down the poster because…not everyone agrees with that principle. No one ever complained about it or spoke against the principle. But the administration fears that…not everyone agrees with that principle. At a public school. So they told her to take it down by the end of the day.

Here’s where the story gets interesting.

Inama did as she was told. She took the poster down. For a few days.

But then she thought about it and decided, no, I can’t live with this decision. The statement in this poster is not a personal opinion; this is the basis of public education. I would do anything for each and every one of my students, she said. I would, quite literally, take a bullet for them, she said. So I am going to affirm that, yes, each and every one of them is welcome here.

She put the poster back up.

Now Inama is facing punishment for “insubordination” from the school district for making sure that her public school remains a public school, that all of her students have an opportunity for an equal education. She’s been given till the end of the year to take the poster down. If she doesn’t, she’ll be sanctioned.

Inama is not backing down. “This is the one small thing that I feel like I can do to speak out against this and stand up for them,” says Inama of her students, “to protect them from being affected by racist sentiments affecting their classroom.”

That line—about the one small thing she could do—instantly reminded me of a moment in Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. The analogy may seem strained, and it is, but the political lesson about compliance and disobedience is not. I wrote about this a long time ago in The Nation:

Even though Arendt was not an observant Jew, that same kind of mindfulness stalks every page of Eichmann in Jerusalem. In the face of great evil, every choice matters, every decision counts. Had there been more men like Anton Schmid, a sergeant in the German Army who, Arendt writes, gave forged papers and trucks to Jewish partisans—and was executed for it—“how utterly different everything would be today.” To those who would say that such actions are “practically useless”—totalitarian regimes seek to eliminate not merely resistance but any recognition or memory of resistance—Arendt replies: “The holes of oblivion do not exist.” “One man,” she adds, with echoes of Sodom and Gomorrah, “will always be left alive to tell the story.” It’s true that “most people will comply” with tyranny, “but some people will not”—and in that zone of possibility, where an ethical minority chooses to act differently from the rest, stands a chosen people, not of descent but of dissent.

Arendt attends to the smallest moments of the Shoah, not to lend her account novelistic detail but to make the point that the devil literally is in the details. “Cooperation” with evil is “gradual,” she explained to a correspondent. It’s always “difficult indeed to understand when the moment had come to cross a line which never should have been crossed.” That is also the banality of evil: the smallness of its package, those gray lines, those devilish details….

If evil comes in small steps, overcoming it, nearing goodness, also inheres in small steps. As Susan Neiman explains: “Arendt was convinced that evil could be overcome only if we acknowledge that it overwhelms us in ways that are minute. Great temptations are easier to recognize and thus to resist, for resistance comes in heroic terms. Contemporary dangers begin with trivial and insidious steps.”

…[That is] the intransigence of [Arendt’s] ethic of everyday life, her insistence that every action matters, that we attend to the minutes of our practice…

Inama’s fight is the fight that all of us now have on our hands. It is a fight that is going to be fought every day, every minute, in workplaces like Inama’s by workers like Inama.

It is a fight that everyone has a stake in, and that everyone can play a role in.

You don’t have to go to a rally. You don’t have to sign a petition. You don’t have to click like on a post. You do have to keep an eye out for moments like these, wherever you work, when you can stand up for a principle that doesn’t involve empty rhetoric, but is instead, so simple and clear, that the force of your idea, and the power of your courage, will move a mountain. If you can do it with a bunch of co-workers, even better.

You can listen to entire segment of Hayes’s show here. I really urge you to do so, for the same reason that Arendt wanted us to pay attention to actions like Shmid’s. The devil is in the details, and the miracle is in the minute. Thinking that salvation lies elsewhere—in the courts, the Constitution, the institutions—means you are already on the road to perdition.