A conversation about fear.

There didn’t seem to be much point in me trying to write about the horrific week in which we witnessed the cell phone video of police firing bullets into Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge on Tuesday, then saw it happen all over again as Philando Castile lay bleeding his life out on the seat of his car in Minnesota on Wednesday, then woke up on Thursday to the news that five police officers had been ambushed and killed during a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas.

What did I have to contribute? Mostly what I know how to write is TV commercials. I know nothing about law enforcement, or what it’s like to live in someone’s skin a different color than my own. My niece served hot chocolate to demonstrators manning the barricades that shut down a street in North Minneapolis last winter after the police shot 24-year-old Jamar Clark. That’s the closest I’ve come to any of this.

Then a conversation happened.

On Friday the CEO of the ad agency where I work invited all of us to gather at noon and talk. He knew we were struggling with the events of the week. I sure wasn’t having any luck coming up with clever ideas. The last time I felt so completely numb trying to work was in the days following the September 11 terrorist attacks.

So we crowded into the agency’s common area and had a conversation. People shared frustration. Disbelief. Outrage. Tears. There was remarkable candor about race and injustice.

Race. Where does that word even come from? Using it makes it sound like we all evolved on different planets. All we’re really talking about here is pigment. The thing my wife, who is an artist, squeezes out of a tube onto her palette. Pigment, the way she uses it to create a painting, is beautiful. Pigment, the way God uses it to create us, is beautiful. How did we ever get that so messed up?

The man who heads our new business department took the microphone and told us that he’d found himself walking around in fear all week because his skin is black. This is one of the most eminently likeable people you will ever meet. Yet he described frightening encounters he’d had with police over the years. Things that become all the more ominous in the context the events in Louisiana and Minnesota and Texas.

At the end of it our boss said something smart. That what we’d really all been talking about for the past hour was fear.

If you haven’t spent much time around an ad agency, that was him doing what we always do. Listening. Distilling. Looking for the central emotion that drives behavior. The one thing that might be a lever to change things.

Recognizing the fear at the center of the problem could be the beginning of the answer we’re all so desperately looking for right now. We have such a long list of things that need fixing. Injustice. Inequality. Indifference. But first we need to stop the bleeding. We can do that by making a conscious decision to stop spreading around so much fear and start spreading a little courage.

Already, in the midst of a terrifying week, we saw remarkable examples of courage. By all accounts the first instinct of the police officers in Dallas was to get the demonstrators to safety, even as it became clear that they themselves were the ones targeted by the shooter.

Then there was Diamond Reynolds, who used her cellphone to chronicle the last moments of the life of Philando Castile as he lay bleeding next to her on the seat of their car. That was the sort of courage under fire you might expect of a hard-bitten war correspondent. Not a girlfriend in Falcon Heights, Minnesota.

There are two things the rest of us can do to start building on those acts of courage. Both involve the smoking gun in all of these tragedies, which is in fact a smoking gun.

I’m not going to bring up the whole gun control debate here. About the only thing that’s accomplished so far has been to give politicians an excuse to spread even more fear. I’m talking about celebrating the small individual act of courage it takes to walk about our streets unarmed. Think about the statement that makes. It says, “I’m willing to take a risk and trust that the people I meet in my neighborhood and around town are well intentioned individuals who don’t mean me any harm.” That doesn’t deny anyone their constitutional right have a gun. It just makes a bigger symbol of those who choose not to give in to fear and add to the problem of too many guns out in the street. That’s the vast majority of us. Let’s celebrate it, maybe even turn into a movement. Maybe my fellow ad people can work on a cammpaign built around something like #couragetogounarmed.

The second idea is more difficult, because it asks more courage from those who already need to have plenty. It makes a risky job even harder. We need a public rethinking of the way law enforcement has been using firearms. Listen to the language right now and you hear the same thing time after time. “Police officers must make split-second life or death decisions.” That says to me that the police, just like society as a whole, are thinking way too often of firearms as personal safety appliances. Like you can somehow be fast enough to get a drop on the potential bad guy without a whole lot of innocent people getting hurt.

The question I have to ask is, what if we made that split second longer? Make overt changes in training and policy so the gun stays in the holster for enough time to give more situations a chance to defuse. Or never become situations in the first place. Make the firearm so well physically anchored in the holster of law enforcement that “he was reaching for my gun” never again becomes sufficient justification for an unarmed person to be shot.

This would require police officers to trust that in the vast majority of situations they are safe in our communities, which I believe is true. It’s also basically the same sort of trust law enforcement is asking the community to give them. That makes for a nice symmetry. It gets us back to respect for the uniform, instead of for the fact that the uniform includes a gun.

Yes, it also makes certain situations much more dangerous for the individual police officer. But, I would argue, maybe not so dangerous as the trajectory we are on now.

These are two ideas that come from looking at a tragic week through the lens of fear and courage. They don’t solve the problem. They might be sufficient to let some healing begin. Or at least slow down the bleeding.