After nearly six months of escalating protests, Hong Kong is a mess, its reputation for efficiency in tatters, its economy in recession, its roads and rails often blocked. And there is no end in sight.

That poses a quandary for those who admire and support the protest movement, but who recoil at the notion of such a unique and vibrant enclave self-destructing. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that the movement has no leadership, no coordinating committee to advise, to cheer or to warn.

In the end, however, there is no choice for those who cherish freedom but to support the protests, as a bill pending in the United States Congress does. The protests may be counterproductive, destructive, leaderless and even futile, but for these same reasons they are an altruistic, self-sacrificing and genuine demonstration that people who have known freedom, even in a limited form, refuse to surrender it.

It is doubtful that Xi Jinping, the authoritarian Chinese leader, understands the resistance or the longing. Those who rise to the pinnacle of a secretive, authoritarian, coercive system like China’s are molded to believe that you can control all the people all the time, if you can only find the right combination of sticks, carrots, lies and information filters. To them, any dissent must be a political plot hatched in dark foreign corners.