Angry Human Stories - What's Yours?
NOTE — Fierce Community is starting weekly Zooms again on July 28 to help us do fierce community in the places where we live. The Zooms will be announced here on this page by July 22, so stay tuned.
PROTESTS TODAY
Hey it’s another huge protest day! We need the big protests, and we need them to continue over time. Thanks to you if you’re in a position to be able to do this thing today — protesting. Tell us your story about it below if you’d like to share!
Also, here’s a really great post by
about what big protests do over time, and why we need to keep them up:
WHAT’S YOUR ANGRY HUMAN STORY?
That being said, our work here at Fierce Community is about civic engagement.
One of the things we can do as part of civic engagement is to tell our stories.
They help us connect, they help us share, they help with solidarity, and they help us empathize. I would love to see us be doing storytelling events in communities this fall and winter. There are lots of options for how to to about doing that.
In any case, it starts with being able to tell your own story. This is always a challenge. We have complicated lives. So, practice is always good.
We get better at advocating for ourselves and others as we tell our stories.
Plus, we connect. We process our emotions. We iterate.
I saw a great vehicle for doing this today in a Facebook group I’m in called “Angry Humans of Iowa.” Here was their process:
The question is (with slight editing)… “I would like to invite all of the Angry Humans to tell us a little bit about yourself.
“What kind of stuff have you experienced that make you feel anger about what’s happening?”
So — I invite you to answer this question here in the comments. Bear in mind that this is a public post, and comments will also be public.
MY QUICK ANGRY STORY
I’ll start by saying I’m really not good at telling short stories, so this approach is a challenge for me. But I’m also trying to get better at just saying what’s on my mind, and not doing so much self-censoring. So here was my answer to this question today, with a few edits:
I'll start in the middle. After 9/11, I gave up my career in wildland fire management at the busiest operations center in the world in Southern California to go take the system that wildfire uses for managing disasters and make it work for the whole country. It's called the National Incident Management System (NIMS) now and it’s sort of mostly used nationally but that will be harder if FEMA gets dissolved.
Along the way I learned about critical infrastructure and then also got fired up about resilience building. Worked to make the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) more resilience-focused versus security-focused. It worked to a point. Some of that work has now become what's called Community Lifelines which were managed by FEMA but also involved the DHS infrastructure office, in CISA.
Some of that is planned to be dismantled now of course. An executive order says the administration intends to take a lot of this stuff apart that was intended to make this country stronger, more resilient, and better able to handle crises, disasters, attacks, and disruption.
Now this department I put a decade into is being used to target and harm humans but not based on actual risks, threats, or vulnerabilities according to homeland security’s own previously established risk analysis approaches and intelligence.
I was never really political after the Democrats didn't advocate strongly for themselves in ‘99 when Republicans went after President Clinton. And then I was a federal employee and had a high level clearance and there was the Hatch Act and so I just didn't do politics.
But then I left the DC area in 2015 and moved home to Iowa. It's right when Trump came back onto the scene in the run-up to the Iowa caucuses for 2016.
I talked with former colleagues at the Department of Homeland Security. We all were noticing how the snowflake-hued supremacist groups supported the now-President and wanted him to cause a civil war to revert society to a more primitive state so that the people with the most firearms could run it (this is now referenced as accelerationism). At the time, some of them were known as the Boogaloo Boys. The media wouldn’t touch any of that even though it was out there; it was considered so far-out and unreal.
Anyway, at the time I also started to understand that he was a demagogue.
Fast forward to the 2018 election, in which the only opposition to Trump did not do well. I decided to get into politics or activism or organizing because I did not see the opposition party reaching rural voters in effective ways and that's where the power base remains for the United States according to how we're structured (for example, through the US Senate, and through the Electoral College — rural areas have incredible and disproportionate power to urban areas).
Anyway eventually I put together a nonprofit for civic engagement to get people engaged and voting. We launched officially in 2022, although we’ve not yet been heavily funded. As such, it’s been a slow buildup with a number of challenges and pauses. While we were hoping to have pushed a big civic engagement movement to help prevent this country from going authoritarian, that didn’t happen — and millions of other efforts and actions to stop it didn’t work either.
So. Here we are.
Anyway now we've got a non-profit for civic engagement and we're focusing on helping people do Fierce Community in communities everywhere to help us all get through this time of rising instability and societal disruption.
We're going to start up zooms again on July 28th to do fierce community. People in any community in the US are welcome to join.
I can also come and speak to Midwestern groups in person if there is interest on how we can do fierce community where we live to get through what's happening. Holler if interested to fiercecommunityteam@gmail.com.
Anyway that's my short story. There's always more! Appreciate the question and I appreciate this group.
That’s not all the stuff I’m angry about, but if I started writing all of that it would turn into an encyclopedia. It’s snippets and samples. It’s a window in.
If you’re looking for an example of shorter storytelling (like, shorter than what I just wrote), a great example is the Humans of New York page on Facebook. Here’s a heavy-duty post from that page just today, but it’s got all the good stuff — and some very hard things, too (consider this a trigger warning). It’s got heart. It’s got deep, tough human stuff. It has a guy telling us that playing chess with random people and spending time with them is good for your soul.
WHAT’S YOUR STORY? WHY ARE YOU FIRED UP ABOUT WHAT’S HAPPENING?
Tell us a little bit about yourself. What kind of stuff have you experienced that make you feel anger about what’s happening?
This nonprofit is also available to help you or groups you work with to do civic engagement stuff, like storytelling events for example. Holler if you’re interested.
Donations help us do more of this work. Take care and be well as we all go forward.
Vanessa Burnett is the director at Fierce Community. This nonprofit work promotes civic engagement through connection, community, creativity, leadership, empowerment, alliances, and resilience in an era of rising instability and societal disruption. Vanessa is a social entrepreneur, advisor, and empower-er for doing fierce community in a time of disruption and disaster. More about the author in this bio and on this other Substack. Email fiercecommunityteam@gmail.com to set up a conversation.