A Beautiful Anarchy

PRETENDING TO BE BRAVE

A handful of years ago you couldn’t swing a dead cat, forgive the expression, without hitting a kid wearing a t-shirt that read, optimistically, NO FEAR. You don’t see a lot of those shirts anymore, probably because the people wearing them died doing things their fear might otherwise have prevented or, more likely, they realized the propaganda didn’t live up to the reality. Ironically, I suspect more people wore the shirt out of a desire to fit in, a backhanded way of saying they were afraid they wouldn’t. No fear, indeed.

Fear has a place in our lives, much the same as pain. Put your hand in the fire as a child, you get burned. Unless you’re a very slow learner, you won’t do that many more times before it occurs to you: ...