Walking Forward & Through
Thoughts To Help Navigate The Moment
NOTES. This Substack is renaming to Fierce Community from Shift the Country to better serve in this moment. Zooms to come soon. Also this post is from my personal Facebook page, thus the emojis.
📜 There's a lot going on.
Here are thoughts to help navigate the moment… in bullet points because maybe that makes it more readable.
Find some grounding. 🌱🌿 Find some hope. ❤️ Find joy somewhere. ⚓ Anchor or tie to this before whatever you do this weekend.
Go in to this moment with eyes wide open. 🧿
Understand risk. Be prudent.
Be courageous.
But also have some strategy and tactics.
Play the long game. Or play the short game. 🎲 But make intentional decisions about the moves you're making.
All is not lost.
Every single thing that's happening does not indicate that all is lost or all is not lost. 🔺↪️ Every single thing that's happening isn't the turning point that's going to make or break everything.
History, turning points, and big pivots are about a thousand million things.
🌊 What we all choose to do in this moment are part of those thousand million things.
Language and attitude matter. 🗯️
Declaring certain things over or resolved doesn't give us all the space to hold on to the thing... whether it's democracy or our humanity or the rule of law or decency etc.
Our language is part of how we hold power. 🤺
We can hold power in part by holding to our faith and hope and dreams for this enormous 4th largest country in the world.
We don't need to cede power. We don't need to disempower ourselves. There are already quite a lot of efforts to do those things for us. We don't need to cooperate and help.
Keeping the idea of this country alive matters.
We need the vision. We need the dreams.
We need the belief that we can transform and update it in ways that serve the actual people so much better than has ever happened. The belief that we can get there on the other side of all this. It's an incredibly powerful belief.
Government and democracy specifically are created to counter the worst inclinations of people who would take advantage of or harm us.
Those working to take government apart want those protections gone as much as they want power and wealth.
More people will be harmed if existing structures are completely dismantled.
^^ That's important for the burn-it-all-down crowd, because more harm to humans will happen if everything metaphorically (or actually) burns down.
Keeping infrastructure and institutions functional is going to be increasingly critical. 🔌
We can hold this stuff together.
We have an incredibly complex government, society, and federalized system made up of multiple levels.
We can work with all that to hold this together.
📈 Things are getting more intense. Not just here in the US but in the world. ☄️💥 Huge things are happening in the Middle East for example just in the last few hours... and they will definitely affect us.
It is absolutely scary. So much is.
Yet we have our humanity and our souls and our love and our fierceness. 🖤⚡
Many things right now are directly threatening harm to humans.
We can choose to find ways to counter all of that and to hold lines.
🧩 Everyone doesn't have to do all of the things, but any of us can do pieces and parts in all kinds of ways that don't just have to do with big protests and spectacle.
Some of the things we can do might just be standing firm and saying you will not do harm here.
Some of the things we can do might just be taking care of people right where we live who need help right now for whatever reason. We're going to need more and more of that.
We can also just *survive* in the midst of it, or in any moment. Sometimes that alone takes incredible wherewithal and resources.
^^ All of us need to keep that in mind because we don't know when we're going to need to focus on survival ourselves in the midst of all this. No doubt we will all need to take some turns.
In whatever form it takes, it will help if we can encourage and empower each other. If we can help each other forward and through.
That's going to look like a lot of different things. We're going to have to invent some of it.
But also humans have been through really tough stuff.
We're going to need to be wily and feisty and creative and persistent and scrappy. And we can be.
Lots of folks are maybe new to standing up for various things or getting involved in civics or protests or politics or social movements.
Whatever we can do to help and encourage people is fantastic.
But also not everyone is going to be in a position to be out front protesting like this weekend. For a huge range of reasons which are really none of our business, but which could be anything from working on basic survival to working on efforts we know nothing about that may not be out front and in public.
We're going to need all of the things as we go through all of this. Food, water, and shelter being the most basic.
🎙️ You can't advocate for and defend a country and a society without the basic needs being met.
Our many forms of privilege may start to be quite challenged, but they already have been for many.
Not everyone has the resilience and resources to fight out front and in public. Worth keeping in mind as these fights intensify.
But we also need people working on the basic pieces and parts of society and movements who are behind the scenes.
Ok then. Long post. Thanks for reading. Please share this if you think it will help others.
In the meantime...
Keep your head on straight.
Try not to panic.
Step back and take a 5-minute break if things get intense.
Keep situational awareness, whether you are out on the streets this weekend or whether you are just doing daily life.
Communicate as clearly and effectively as possible.
Default to caring and kindness whenever possible.
Caring and kindness are effective tools for disarming, de-escalation, diffusing, and defusing... even when that is metaphorical. Those four D's are super powerful.
Keep the faith, in us.
This is a long transformation and we are possibly in the very early stages.
We need resilience, strength, deep connections, big coalitions, and serious community.
Whatever we are doing this weekend can include some of that... and then we can build on it.
Be safe.
Try not to get dead. Like put some effort into it. We need us.
Onward and forward.
🤺🖤⚡
"That's how we're gonna win: not fighting what we hate, saving what we love." — Rose Tico, in Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi
Vanessa Burnett is the director at Fierce Community. This nonprofit work promotes connection, community, coordination, creativity, engagement, empowerment, leadership, and resilience in an era of rising instability and societal disruption. Email fiercecommunityteam@gmail.com to set up a conversation. Vanessa is a social entrepreneur, advisor, and empower-er for doing fierce community in a time of disruption and disaster. Ms. Burnett has a rare systems-level understanding of the pieces and parts that modern society needs in order to survive that can help people and groups navigate this era of fast change and unprecedented challenges. 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.