NOTES. We’re doing a zoom tonight on what this post is about — countering fear. Sign up here. Here’s a 9/11 post I just put up on my personal Substack about two guys on a train, and how they were trying to hold on to their humanity. And here’s the earlier 9/11 post here on this Fierce Community page today.
“What do stars do? SHINE.” — Yvaine, a star, in the movie Stardust
The Fear Is Pervasive — Now
Like with any day in this new era, everything is potentially terrifying today.
What's happening in Europe is absolutely breathtaking all on it's own let alone what's been going on in the US this week.
Political violence ramping up in the US is going to lead to more of something. We don't know what yet.
Everybody on all the sides is already spreading wild theories and disinformation and blame related to yesterday's assassination (idea: we can all not be that guy, or gal).
And of course there's just the regular everyday spectacularly shocking legal and administrative news.
🔮 At this point it's predictably terrible, terrifying, overwhelming, and possibly dis-empowering. All at the same time. Every day.
In all of that is the fear. ⚫
It's just everywhere. It's in everything.
One of the things that gets me in all of this is how much everybody is spreading fear, too. Not on purpose I don't think. Well okay some of it is.
But I think some people are scared themselves and want to tell other people what they're scared of and want to hear from the other people that they're scared too and boy we're all scared and holy cow there's a lot to be scared about.
‼️ But wait! Did you see this thing to be scared about? I mean I know you know about all these other things to be scared about but do you know about THIS PARTICULAR THING?????
The Power Of Fear
I know this:
24 years ago we watched people jumping out of buildings on TV because the buildings were on fire from someone flying airplanes into them.
To scare us.
I know that we watched those buildings collapse, at the World Trade Center.
We saw the fire at the Pentagon for months and months after it got hit by a plane.
We heard stories about the plane that went down in Pennsylvania from Americans who took it down once they knew this was a terrorist attack. ✈️
It was a terrorist attack meant to scare us and to hurt us and to take out some of our important assets but also to show that they could hit us in our important assets.
It was a terrorist attack meant to weaken this country and arguably it worked. Look at where we're at. But that's a different point.
It was a terrorist attack meant to weaken our economy and convince us to spend ourselves into security oblivion. Arguably that worked too. But again that's a different point.
It was meant to scare us.
It was meant to cause us to cower and hide.
It was meant for us to make decisions to give away our power.
People use fear sometimes when they don't have any other option. Doesn't make it okay.
But sometimes they're using that fear so that they can take more power. Maybe they don't have any.
But maybe they also have a lot.
✔️ And that's the situation we're in right now in these United states.
🏛️💰 The people pushing the fear already have a lot of power and they want more.
They want us to give more of our power away, and to let them have it.
They think if they scare us enough that it will work.
Will it, though? 💭
The America that I saw in the aftermath of 9/11 was not having it. The fear.
Okay well yeah to be fair we did a hell of a lot of spend ourselves into security oblivion reaction. That definitely happened. Plus very much war. We went on offense big time. So okay yeah we definitely had a fear reaction.
But we also did one hell of a lot to not stay in that place in our daily lives and in lots of things that we put in place in reaction to 9/11.
I personally worked on lots and lots of things within the US government that were meant to help us be stronger as a country and more resilient. Like with a more resilient way to respond to disasters, to keep our infrastructure up and going, to keep our economies going in the midst of disaster, to have a more robust incident management system, and so on. Lots of good stuff. And that's just the stuff I touched.
Tons and tons of things were put in place so that we addressed some of the vulnerabilities we had around 9/11. We reduced risks. We built resilience. We put security things in place, which have varying levels of actual effectiveness. But we did lots of those kinds of things.
We Can Counter Fear
But so much of what happened after 9/11 outside of government and systems was about love.
It was about loving people. Having wake up calls. Changing our lives to be more meaningful. Changing our priorities. Spending more time with people you love. All that kind of stuff.
We got downright fierce about it.
We got downright fierce about putting our humanity forward and about loving each other and taking care of each other.
❤️ We need all of that now. We need the fierce love. We need the fierce community. We need the fierce humanity.
We need the resilience and the stronger systems and the preparedness and all of that too.
⭐My point is that we can counter fear, and we can do a hell of a lot more with that.⭐
Fear is the biggest weapon being used right now to try and pressure us into giving in and giving up our power.
Fear takes our breath away.
Fear gets us in our souls and our solar plexus and our guts and our hearts.
✔️ That's all very true. Fear is quite motivating as well. It's part of how we got into this mess. Selling fear of other people is a big part of how the people in power *got* more power.
But there's other stuff that can get into our souls and our solar plexus and our guts and our hearts. It's also pretty freaking motivating.
It's love. It's our people. It's the communities we have. It's the families and friends we have. It's the lives we've built. It's the places where we live. It's the homes we have. It's the buildings we live in.
It's the huge range of places where we work and meet and worship and share and heal and eat together and have fun and deal with tragedy and all the things.
It's our humanity. It's how we love. It's how we live.
All of that stuff — ALL OF IT — is so so so so so much more powerful than fear.
It absolutely is. You won't convince me otherwise. I've spent a lot of time on this. I have a consulting business named for countering fear. I used to have a website on the same thing. I filed a trademark on it once. I've thought a lot about how we counter fear.
It is absolutely not even a little bit sexy.
Part of the reason it's not my out-front thing anymore is because nobody wants to talk about fear. Because it's not sexy. But also because it gets you in your gut. Even just the word "fear."
So now we're pushing fierce community. And the reason why is because we want to fight for the things we love.
That's how we counter fear.
We figure out what we love. We go about fighting for it.
But not just fighting. Actively loving.
We go about actively loving each other. We go about actively loving people around us. We go about actively loving total strangers. However this works.
There's lots of ways to love. There's lots of ways to take care of people. There's lots of ways to put our humanity out front and forward.
That's how we counter the terror and the fear that they want us to fall prey to.
They want us in hidey holes.
But we can be out here shining. ☀️
We can be out here playing. 🤸🏼♀️🎶💃🏾🌱 We can be out here growing things and having dinners and having parties and celebrating and actively defending people who actively need defending. We can be out here reducing risk. We can be out here advocating. We can be out here being quiet and doing things behind the scenes. All of that.
We can be out here being courageous.
Hell if we need to we can be like the people on the airplane on 9/11 who knew there was a threat and stood up and took it down. Like they took down the whole damn threat.
That is absolutely fierce community. That is deep love. That is love for strangers you don't even know.
We're going to need to be strong. We're going to need to empower each other.
It works better when we do it together. And so we are doing all kinds of things like this all over the place in this country. But we can still do way more.
Anyway if you want to get together and have tough talks about this stuff with other people online, we're doing that here. Join us. We can empower each other and commiserate and process fear but also do the fierce thing. Live deeply and love deeply and all that.
Next week we'll be doing regular get-togethers on all that twice a week online.
✔️ This is the stuff. We get through this by working together. By empowering each other. By countering fear.
We do it with people and we do it with fierce community.
As my old fire chief boss used to say, let's went.
☀️⚡⭐
This nonprofit work is funded by donations through ActBlue, through Patreon, and through paid Substack subscriptions.
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. It’s through-finding by countering fear. Vanessa is a social entrepreneur, advisor, and empower-er with a systems-level understanding of the pieces and parts that modern society needs in order to survive. She has over 25 years experience in resilience-building, civic engagement, coalition-building, critical infrastructure, systems thinking, big disasters, catastrophes, wildland fire, emergency management, incident management, land management, park rangering, homeland security, continuity of operations (COOP), continuity of government (COG), technology innovation, public communication, and disaster information sharing.
What a great piece, Vanessa. I am well too aware of what fear can do - on a personal level and those I work with around stepping into their voices. And, you are absolutely right about the aim of the people currently in power in this United States. They want to make us afraid so we give them more power. "The cities are hellscapes! Let us get in there and make them safer" kind of BS. AND, I couldn't agree more about your antidote. Fierce, active love - of those close to us, of our friends, families, communities, countries, the earth. The whole thing. I can't join the call tonight, but wanted to pop in here and say thank you for this post and for the work you're doing. 💗🙏🏻🌺✨