The Banners of San Francisco - City Lights and the Silent Uprising of Words

Sometimes it takes no scream, only a sentence. In San Francisco, on the façade of the legendary bookstore City Lights Booksellers & Publishers, four large banners have been hanging since this week - white fabric, black letters, simple admonitions - and yet they strike like a blow into the silence:

“Pity the nation whose leaders are liars.”
“Pity the nation whose sages are silenced and whose fanatics dominate the airwaves.”
“Pity the nation that praises conquerors and calls the tyrant a hero.”
“Pity the people who allow their freedoms to erode and their rights to be washed away.”

These are sentences that burn themselves into the cityscape - quiet, yet inescapable. Sentences inspired by the Lebanese-American poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the founder of that very house, which is speaking again today because others remain silent. City Lights is more than a bookstore. It is a symbol - of courage, of counterculture, of that kind of intellect that refuses to stay silent when the state tightens its reins. In the 1950s, it was Ferlinghetti’s publishing house that released Allen Ginsberg’s Howl - a scandal then, world literature now. And now, seven decades later, poetry once again hangs on its walls - this time as a warning.

The banners did not appear by coincidence this week. The U.S. government has sent federal agents to the Bay Area - officially to support “security operations,” but in truth, as many in San Francisco feel, to show presence. Intimidation as routine. In the streets, a new nervousness is spreading, a sense that federal power is drawing ever closer. In front of the store’s windows, passersby stop, take pictures, nod, some read the lines aloud. In a city that has always resisted political overreach, literature becomes once more what it once was - a form of resistance. “Words are stronger than violence,” Ferlinghetti once said. On this day, it feels as if the city is answering him.

The protest banners at City Lights are not slogans, not hashtags, not buzzwords. They are reminders. That freedom is not a state, but an action. That truthfulness is not an ideal, but a daily act. And that in times when lies sound like commands, the simplest sentence can become a revolution. Thus, the old bookstore stands amid the unrest like a monument to language - unshakable, defiant, awake. And the words on its façade hang there like a vow: that America should define itself not only by power, but by courage.