A Note on Fear

There was another attack on the base today. Closer than previous attacks, but this time, no serious injuries and thankfully, no deaths.

It happened this morning, and I was in the chow hall eating. Suddenly, the siren went off "BRRR, BRRR, BRRR...Incoming, incoming, incoming." Everyone stopped eating. A few people got down off of their chairs and considered crawling under the table. That would have been silly. If a mortar or rocket hit our building and came through the roof - that little plastic table won't do you much good.

I didn't have my body armor with me. None of us did. Going outside to get to the bunkers was out of the question, as we were safer inside than out. So I continued to eat my french toast. After all, I was hungry, my lunch hour (breakfast is my lunch) was short, and I had to get back to work once the attack was over.

"Boom, boom, boom" I exchanged a glance with the guys around me. We guessed the location based on the sound. Boom was certainly closer than whump. But still a good distance off. After about six impacts, there were no more. A few minutes later, the all-clear sounded.

Something a friend of mine back home said has been running around my head for a couple of weeks. After I described an attack on the base, she said that my nonchalance really worried her.
Why, I wonder?

She seemed to have wanted me to have more fear about that particular event, or express more concern. The fact that I didn't kind of shocked her.

First of all, make no doubt about it. I am not some Bravado-filled, 18-year-old kid, who thinks nothing can happen to him. The kind who skateboards, skydives, or jumps his pickup - Dukes of Hazzard Style. Even so, there is a philosophy that only those who take risks can truly be said to live. Or as Friedrich Nietzsche, the late 19th Century Philosopher, said, "Live Dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius!"

Of course, Fred was always a bit of a shock jock, and almost everything he said must be taken with a grain of salt, as hyperbole. But he nonetheless had a point. Living your life based on fear, being - as one philosophy professor I read opined - "the ultimate couch potato" can hardly be said to be living much at all. When you reach old age and look back at your life, you need to have some achievements to point to that you can be proud of. Not that they all have to involve risk, but they have to be real, genuine. It can't be that you watched every episode of some T.V. show.

My own re-evaluation of my belief in "invincibility" came back several years ago when I was injured in a farming accident. I fractured three vertebrae in my back, and had I landed a little different, could have been paralyzed. It was the kind of moment that made me sit up and think. Or more accurately, lie there on my back, keep frantically pressing the little buzzer until the nurse came in to give me more morphine...and think.

But rather than pull in and avoid risk - avoid life - I decided to take a much more discerning view of it. Risk is one thing. Stupid risk is another. Don't avoid risk just out of fear. Accept it, grow comfortable with it, minimize it, but live your life. That's really the only thing you can do. Just as we were all at one point paranoid teenagers afraid to take the car out onto the interstate, we outgrew that fear, gained confidence and turned our 1980 Pontiacs up the on-ramp of life.

That is how you deal with fear. You figure out the dangers, improve yourself to avoid as many of them as you can, and you go out there, into the world, and face them.

I guess if you played semantics, you could make a distinction between different types of fears. There's healthy fear, paralyzing fear, and angst.

Angst, in the German, is kind of a general, all-around fear of life, the universe and everything. When you're afraid of the future, worried about the state of youth, global warming or the coming of the Great Pumpkin...that's angst.

There's really not much you can do about angst. It's beyond you, unreachable, inviolate. So you just live with it. For me, in college, I dealt with angst through poetry, and in fact, most of the romantic poets - Keats, Shelley, Byron and Coleridge, were all about angst. Beethoven was angst defined. The Fifth Symphony is a practical explosion of angst, mixed with a good dose of "Sturm und Drang" - Storm and Stress. In his Ninth (and last) Symphony, he turned the minor-chord angst into a passionate, major chord euphoria.

Angst can either eat you up or motivate you, as it did Beethoven. Sometimes it does both, as the Ninth shows so well.

Moving on to the more specific types of fear, we have what I call healthy fear and paralyzing fear. They're really the same kind of fear, met with different responses.

Healthy fear is learning a danger, developing a plan of action that minimizes it, staying cool under stress and implementing that plan. Paralyzing fear is just what the name implies. It's not meeting your fear, but surrendering to it.

Put simply, healthy fear is keeping an eye out as you walk around, looking for dangers, or mapping out in your mind the locations of all the bunkers, so you can find them even in the blackness of night. Paralyzing fear is just cowering. Hiding.

The first kind of fear is a vital instinct for survival that God or evolution (I tend to see the supposed conflict as irrelevant, since one is a cause and the other is a mechanism) put into us. Primative man knew that when he heard the saber-toothed tiger roar, it was time to pull out the spear or climb into a tree for protection.

The second kind of fear doesn't actually make you safer - but does exactly the oposite. Paralyzing fear leaves you numb, unresponsive, panicked. And panicking has never saved a single person in the history of mankind, unless by sheer luck.

The panicked man rolls up into a fetal ball, which is nice and convenient for the saber-toothed-tiger to chew on, and saves him the effort of chasing him down. The man with healthy fear is active, not passive, and lives more often than not.

Ultimately, healthy fear does not guarantee your survival, and panicking does not guarantee the opposite. But your odds are better when you keep your wits, turn your fear instinct into a positive fear response, and do your best to meet the challenge.

As we left the dining facility, dawn had come, and black smoke curled up into the sky in one direction. We walked in the direction of work and, coming around a corner, caught a glimpse of a sheet of flame rising up from beyond a building. Of the six or seven shots they sent over us, only one had hit anything substantive. We couldn't tell, but it looked like it may have been a parked car. For those there at the scene, fear - paralyzing fear - would have done them absolutely no good at all. For the rest of us, healthy fear - rethinking our emergency response plans, putting our noses back to the grindstone and getting to work - was the only real option.