They could not.

There is a power in a person who has stopped being afraid, even a very small person, that compels attention, that makes a whole room of adults who have spent years enabling a tyrant sit up and watch.

Some of them, I think, felt shame, watching a seven-year-old do the thing not one of them had ever found the courage to do.

Some of them felt fear, sensing that the order of their world was about to be disturbed.