The other day a friend said something I’ve been thinking about ever since. Speaking about the panic over Donald Trump’s swift and sweeping attacks on the legal, educational, journalistic, and social infrastructure of this country, she said, “The one thing we must not succumb to is fear.”
She’s right. I’m sure she’s right.
Yet I feel fear.
Because I’ve done a lot of bold things in my life, some of my friends think I’m fearless, but that’s not true. In fact, I’m often seized with fear. I grew up with an alcoholic father, who would attack my mother verbally and physically when he got drunk. I was terrified that he would kill her, so I took on the role of her protector. Fear pervaded my youth, but something inside me rebelled when I was about sixteen, and I vowed that fear would not stop me from doing what I felt called to do.
But what if fear just makes you feel stuck and helpless, like I felt as a girl? That’s the predicament so many are facing now as Trump assaults all we’ve relied on.
“Real power is—I don’t even want to use the word—fear,” Trump told journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa in March 2016. An editorial in the New York Times on January 19 of this year that opened with that quotation went on to explain that in his business and his previous presidency, Trump has relied on fear as a tactic to get people to do what he wants. Two weeks into his second presidency, many are responding as he must have known they would. The University of Southern Michigan canceled a Lunar New Year festival just in case it could be considered DEI-friendly. Media executives are hanging out in Mara Lago to praise Trump. A Republican senator who challenged one of his Cabinet appointees backed down under pressure.
A lot of well-meaning people tell us that fear is just a state of mind. They imply that, if you feel fear, you lack the kind of emotional balance they apparently have. Well, I think the current danger for the climate and the United States democracy gives us good reason for fear.
So how do we cope with it? Here are a few thoughts:
Forbes quotes Swiss sociologist Jennifer Walter, who advises us to set boundaries. “Pick 2-3 key issues you deeply care about and focus your attention there. You can’t track everything. Impact comes from sustained focus, not scattered awareness.”
The writers of the Times editorial quoted above remind us to resist making decisions based on fear. “This country and its principles are too vital to sacrifice anything in the interest of going along when Mr. Trump huffs and puffs. America will stand strong as long as people stand up for it. There’s no reason to surrender or get a foreign passport or move to Canada.”
Today I was talking to two friends about the subject. (Fear is a pretty common topic of conversation these days.) One, a dancer, said she likes to find where fear resides in her body and then explore it. This exercise, she said helps free her from the “narrative,” that ongoing story the brain conjures and reconjures to hold us in its grip.
I myself am trying to use my fear as a prod to action: writing my Congressional representatives, deciding not to go to a birthday party this afternoon and instead attending a protest rally downtown, searching out stories in the news about people who are plucking up the courage to resist Trump. These are simple actions, but they make me feel less powerless.
WRITING
My essay, “The Monster of Grim Prospects,” is an exploration of how fear affects some of the heroes and heroines of myth.
It was published in Parabola many years ago, but it’s very relevant to the topic of this blog.
Image above: Yamataka Vajrabhairava Ekavira, form a Tibetan bodhisattva of wisdom