Championing the Underdog is Easy…Until It Costs You Something

Everybody loves the underdog.

At least, that’s what we like to tell ourselves.

We cheer when the little guy wins. We love the kid who stands up to the bully. We applaud the person who says something when everyone else stays quiet.

From a safe distance, courage is incredibly popular.
It gets more complicated when you’re the one who has to do it.

Dani Mannion is nineteen years old.

At nineteen, you’re old enough to recognize when something is wrong, but not necessarily old enough for anyone to care that you’ve recognized it.

You don’t have much power yet. You probably don’t have much money. You don’t have a title. You haven’t accumulated decades of experience or a list of impressive people who will take your call.

When you challenge something that has existed longer than you have, there is always someone ready to explain why you simply don’t understand how things work.
Like, you’re young or maybe, you’re emotional.
You’re naive or you’ll understand when you’re older.
And of course, the perennial favorite: That’s just the way it is.

Dani has a particular problem with that last one.
She doesn’t set out to become anyone’s champion. She certainly doesn’t wake up dead and decide she’s going to take on the afterlife.

She notices things.
She notices when someone is frightened.
She notices when someone doesn’t have a voice.
She notices when the rules seem to protect the people enforcing them more than the people living under them.

And once Dani sees something, she has a very difficult time pretending she didn’t.

That’s where championing the underdog gets hard.
Eventually, caring requires something from you.

Sometimes it means being the only person in the room willing to say, “This isn’t right.” Sometimes it means standing next to the person everyone else has decided is inconvenient.

Sometimes it means asking a question when you already know the people in charge aren’t going to like it.

And sometimes it means discovering that doing the right thing doesn’t mean you’re going to win.

That may be the hardest lesson of all when you’re nineteen.

We tell young people to stand up for what they believe in, right up until what they believe in challenges something we would rather they leave alone.

Then suddenly their passion becomes immaturity. Their persistence becomes disrespect. Their questions become a problem.

Dani isn’t fearless. I don’t think fearless people are particularly interesting.

She gets scared.
She gets overwhelmed.
She gets hurt.

There are moments when she wants someone older, wiser and more powerful to fix it. But sometimes nobody does.

So the nineteen year old does something.
Not because she believes she can save everyone.
Because she cannot convince herself that being powerless is the same thing as being excused.

That’s what I love most about Dani. Her greatest strength isn’t The Blue. It isn’t some hidden supernatural power waiting to be discovered.

It’s that tiny, stubborn piece of humanity inside her that keeps saying:

But what about them?
The overlooked.
The frightened.
The ones who don’t understand the rules.
The ones nobody thinks are important enough to disrupt the system for.
The underdogs.

Maybe being their champion doesn’t mean you always save them.

Maybe sometimes it simply means making sure somebody stood beside them when it mattered.

And maybe nineteen isn’t too young to change the world.

Maybe it’s exactly young enough to still believe the world actually can change.