I never went back to my home. I’ve only been back to my town twice: for my mother’s funeral and for a wedding. Even then, I was only in town as long as I needed to be. I’m not welcome there. People there don’t look at the fact that I knew right from wrong. They look at the fact that I put an Iraqi before an American . . .

[A] lot of people up there view me as a traitor. Even some of my family members think I’m a traitor. One of my uncles does, and he convinced my brother not to talk to me anymore. So my wife had to hide in a relative’s house . . . .

The evidence clearly indicated that the defendant was not responsible for the plaintiff’s injuries and, therefore, that the plaintiff was not entitled to recover money for his injuries. Nevertheless, one by one, the jury members voted in favor of the plaintiff, and each gave their reason: because the plaintiff was badly hurt and obviously needed money to help pay the medical bills…and the defendant’s insurance company clearly had the resources to satisfy that need. After about six or seven jury members all sided with the plaintiff in this manner, the vote got to me. I rejected everything the previous jury members had said and sided with the defendant, and I gave my reason: because the judge had told us to decide based on the facts, and the facts clearly showed that the defendant was innocent. I then used these facts to dismantle the arguments given by the previous jurors. The end result: the previous jurors all reversed their votes and unanimously sided with the defendant.

Likewise, just this morning, one of the news shows interviewed the soldier who blew the whistle on the prisoner abuses in Abu Ghraib prison. The guy and his family all received death threats, but when asked if he would do it all over again, the soldier answered yes, he would, “because it needed to be done.”

Rosa Parks is another example. Who would have thought that a middle-aged woman — a seamstress by trade — would trigger a tidal wave of opposition to racial segregation and change virtually the entire nation’s perception of race relations, just by refusing to give up her seat a bus?

And despite what Protestant Fundamentalists might say about science being a “religion,” scientists are notorious iconoclasts. Galileo defied the entire Catholic church when he declared the earth, not the sun, to be the center of our solar system. Darwin challenged millennia of Biblical dogma by suggesting that humans descended not from Adam and Eve, but from a prosimian ancestor. Early physicists in the field of quantum mechanics — Neils Bohr in particular — demonstrated that the objects we perceive as solid (an oak table, for example, or a steel bridge) actually consist of mostly empty space. The list goes on and on. Were it not for the scientists who brought Western civilization out of the Middle Ages during the Enlightenment and the centuries that followed, we might still have the Spanish Inquisition burning people at the stake for daring to question Catholic doctrine.

Indeed, sometimes it takes only one dissenter to break the dam.