This is Part 1 of a series. Be sure to check out Part 2!

Last week, Ahmed Mohamed became a household name when he brought a homemade clock to school and was arrested because a teacher thought it looked like a bomb. Like this, or something. The fourteen year old was snatched from obscurity and flung to the national stage. He even has a Wikipedia page now. In the days that followed the incident was decried as a knee-jerk reaction from an ignorant, racist public school system that clearly failed a bright and ambitious student. The public response to the arrest was appalled, if not surprised.

But what’s only barely been mentioned in the news is the most disconcerting part: the school has doubled down. Not only have officials from the Irving School District not apologized for the incident, they’ve insisted that they reacted properly. They’ve downplayed the racial aspect of the arrest, and encouraged students to speak out when they see anything “suspicious” at all. In short, they’ve encouraged their students to continue to affirm the greatest threat to American prosperity: our nation wide culture of fear.

It is, fundamentally, a predisposition toward being afraid that accounts for the insanity of our [lack of] firearm policy and of our hegemonic foreign policy. It feeds systemic racism and makes people drive like dicks. Fear on a national scale is crippling our democracy, eroding our faith in our neighbors, and somehow, on individual level still presents the greatest avenue for personal growth and discovery.

Being afraid is the basest animal emotion. It’s a sensation that we share with every living thing. And in a time in human history when we’re safer than we ever have been before, the tendency to be wary or afraid is still deeply ingrained.

So for the next couple of weeks I’m going to use this space to talk a little bit about fear. Fear as a tool of influencing policy, fear as a means for introspection, and fear as a kind of surrogate for empathy.

Of course I don’t actually know anything, so please feel free to chime in!

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