There is no more terrifying aspect to life at sea than a fire aboard.
We were taught in the Navy that the most hopeless approach to a fire was to run from it.
You fight it or you die. Yeah, you may die in the process of fighting the fire, but your shipmates may live on.
Or you may just knock the fire down and live on to champagne celebration.
Fire at sea is terrifying. You have two options: run or fight. Running means heaving yourself overboard and abandoning all to ruin. Fighting means hope.
Fighting means you have a plan, and you are going to put it into play. Fighting means you will not abandon your shipmates. Rather, you will go in after them and pull their toasty butts out of the front and fight on for them. Whether they be dead or alive, you got them out of there and faced the front yourself.
Back when I was in Navy basic training (boot camp) I was appointed the discretionary position of recruit leader. One day we went to shipboard firefighting school. The drill consisted of a huge tank of ignited jet fuel in a controlled condition, but muthah-fukkah it was hot! My job was to lead, to follow instructions, and to not blench lest my shipmates allow me to roast alive. I did not blench, though I came out with heat radiation burns. No big deal. No worse than a sunburn, though if I had not continued to lead and direct and hold, my shipmates may have given up heart, and I would have been taken out on a stretcher to an ambulance or a hearse.
Yet I had confidence in my instructors, confidence in the science of firefighting, and confidence in those who I had been appointed to lead.
We knocked that simulated shipboard fire down that day, time after time after drill after drill, and I learned something.
You don't run from fire. You may evade, but you always fight. You don't blench.
Fire may be hot, but you can knock it down. As long as you don't blench.
It's the simple fire triangle: heat, fuel, oxygen. Take any of the three legs of this triangle out and the fire is dead.
There is a political lesson analagous to this. To my mind, what we face is a fire, and here's how we knock it down: first step, take its air out of it. Smother the air of unreason with the water of logic. Second step is to take the heat out of it: temper uncivil discourse with compassion. Third step, take the fuel out of it. Facts will prevail over anecdote.
Call me a dreamer. Go right ahead. But I have fought fire aboard land and at sea and I know how to defeat it.