I lay awake at night and I feel afraid. I’m afraid for my children, afraid for my wife, afraid for my parents, afraid for all the people I love and what could happen to them.

For some reason I was laying in bed the other night, being afraid, and the national anthem popped into my head. “The home of the brave.” line stuck with me.

Our country is afraid. Our country was built on fear. Our country is ruled by fear. The fear started with rich colonists who were afraid that parliament was going to take away their land and their money. They spread their fear to the lower classes and a revolution occurred.

The Articles of Confederation and the Constitution are both documents written out of fear. The Articles were so fearful of centralized government as to be useless. The Constitution is nothing but fear. The compromises made were made out of fear. The south feared their slaves were going to be taken away, they were afraid of being dominated by the north. They were afraid of an army.

The fear persisted into the 19th century. Fear of immigrants. The south lived in fear of their enslaved people and also in fear that they would be taken away. They feared the later so much that they committed treason and fought against the United States in an effort to keep the right to own people.

It only got worst in the 20th century. Fear of communism led to the Cold War, the space race, star wars, the Korean War, The Vietnam War and too many other small conflicts to count. White people were afraid of what would happen if black people had equal rights. Men were afraid of what would happen if women had equal rights.

Today, fear is the overwhelming mood of our country. The right is fearful of what the left is going to take away from them, stoked by Fox News. The left is afraid of what the right will take away if given the chance, and rightfully so. People still fear the other, a person of a different race, a person from a different place, people who love differently, people who think differently.

I’m afraid. I’m afraid for my family and my friends and my country. I’m afraid that the fear that has been sown in the last 250 years of the country’s existence has reached a point where its to much to overcome.