When I was very young, during the war that wasn’t supposed to be (since we had already fought the war to end all wars), we had blackout drills. We would pull the shades, turn all the lights off, and wait to be told that we could turn the lights back on again.

I was too young to wonder why. Benson, NC is about 125 miles inland; so no German subs were going to lob a shell into Medlin & Dorman. And it was too far for German bombers to fly. And if they could, why would they? But we regularly did our blackout drills.

When I wondered about it later, I thought that it might have been to make the war more real to us so that we would keep stomping tin cans and bringing scrap metal in. But nothing could make the war more real than knowing that my daddy wasn’t coming home at night and watching my mother sit on the edge of the bed crying. Still later, I finally figured out why a little town a long way from the guns had blackout drills: they—the people who ordered the blackout drills—wanted us to believe that they—the Huns and the Yellow Hordes—were coming after us.

They stuck a monster under our beds so we would be appropriately and effectively afraid.

Less than ten years after the end of WWII, Collier’s ran a photorealistic illustration of Manhattan ablaze under a mushroom cloud. Since we had taken care of the first monster, we needed another. Because of things like that I would stand on the front porch facing what I thought was the northwest, waiting for the missiles that were surely coming from Russia. Than monster lasted a long time.

It seems important to people who want to direct us that we be properly afraid.

In my lifetime I’ve been told that I should fear Jews, Catholics, Blacks, Yankees, Gays, Mexicans, poor people, rich people, religious people, atheists (or secular humanists), Japanese, Germans, Muslims, Communists and probably two or three other groups that I’ve forgotten. All of these people were intent on taking something important away from me. At least, that’s what I was told.

Everybody has somebody they want me to be afraid of. Because if I’m sufficiently afraid, I can be stampeded into doing very strange things and believing even stranger ones.

For instance, otherwise rational people in Germany were convinced that the Jews were going to destroy their country and had to be stopped. This at a time when the Jewish population of Germany was less than 1% of the total.

We got so fearful of the Japanese that we rounded up thousands of them, took their property, and put them into camps. Even though they were US citizens and had committed no crime except that of being of Japanese extraction.

We have people calling us to arms to defend our religion against the war on Christianity. Even though about 70% of the people in the US identify themselves as Christians. And much of this seems to be based on whether a store clerk whom I don’t know wishes me “Happy Holidays,” instead of “Merry Christmas.”

And this month a person who was presumably considered sane by his constituents when they elected him to the Georgia legislature proclaimed that he was going to introduce the “Pastor’s Protection Act,” to keep pastors from having to choose between following their religious convictions and performing same-sex marriages. He must not have gotten the memo that pastors can—and have—refused to perform marriages for a number of reasons. Some won’t marry people who have been divorced. Some won’t marry people of different races. Some won’t marry people of different faiths. The preacher who performed my daughter’s wedding would not marry a couple unless they completed a series of premarital sessions.

Since the legislator seems to be protecting people who don’t really need his protection, I would refer him to a group that does: the 20% of Georgia children who are—in bureaucratese—nutritionally insecure. That means they are hungry. Work on that for a while.

There are things we should deal with. September 11 taught us that, but we should deal with them specifically. After September 11 I thought that we should pursue with all of our might the people who had attacked us on our own soil. Instead we invaded Iraq.

I am not a pacifist. In fact, I am a proponent of disproportionate retaliation. And we do have real enemies that we have to deal with. But I’m very much for making sure we aim at the right targets and use the right weapons. I will not let anybody convince me that allowing two men or two women to get married is going to make my own marriage a bit less holy. Nor am I going to let terrorists such as the coward who gunned down the four Marines in Tennessee this week be used as a reason to convince me that we should go invade another country.

I’m just tired of people or groups of people trying to turn my fear into their profit. And I’m just as tired of people who enlist in these phony wars.  I will make it a point to treat Jews, Catholics, Blacks, Yankees, Gays, Mexicans, poor people, rich people, Japanese, Germans, Muslims, and—if I should ever encounter one—communists not with tolerance, because they should not have to wait for me to tolerate them, but with respect. Because I genuinely believe that most people out there really don’t want to take anything important away from me.

No monsters. Not under my bed or in my closet.