Should we Americans be afraid nowadays, more afraid than, say, we had a right to be ten or thirty years ago? The answer is “yes,” but to understand why we need first to orient ourselves as to what fear actually is, briefly parse the main underlying sources of our current fears, and finally link these basics to what's been happening lately in our country and in the world.
Fear is a basic human emotion, always latent in everyone if not actually present at any given waking moment. And the reason is that fear helps preserve us from danger; without it, and the fight-or-flight physiological complex that goes along with it, humans would not have gotten very far as a species.
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