Just Hold On, Girl

Bulgaria in November 2013: students have been sitting in front of parliament in Sofia for three weeks, blocking the building, calling the government the Red Mafia, demanding its resignation. The protests started after the May elections that put a socialist-backed cabinet into power in one of the EU’s poorest and most corruption-worn countries. The escalation, when it comes, feels inevitable.

But before the escalation there is a photograph. Stefan Stefanov takes it: a female student, face close to a police officer’s face, apparently pleading with him not to beat her and her friends. And the officer—instead of doing what officers do in these situations—starts crying. He tells her: Just hold on, girl.

I keep thinking about that image. Not because it proves something about the goodness of people, which it doesn’t—one weeping cop doesn’t redeem a system—but because it’s a real moment of two human beings briefly making contact across a line that’s supposed to make that impossible. He’s still standing on the wrong side of it. She’s still going to get beaten, probably, by somebody else. But for one second there was a person on both ends of the confrontation, and somebody was paying attention, and the picture exists.

That matters, even when it doesn’t change anything.