Then, of course, as we got older, we were fed a steady diet of horror stories, courtesy mostly of the Brothers Grimm – ogres and ogresses, trolls grumbling under bridges, witches in gingerbread houses with child-sized ovens, evil giants with lots of gold – all of them out to get us if we got too close. Fairy tales, they were called. Somehow, we survived them. At least as far as I can tell.

Our perspectives changed, presumably, as we got older. Saint Paul reminds the Corinthians of the phenomenon in his first letter to them. But do we, really? I have a decades-long history of disagreements with that old Turkish Pharisee, and this is one of them. His description of the transformation is just a bit too neat and tidy to describe what we can see all around us, if we look and listen.

A lot of our countrymen and -women are frightened as children. They still fancy monsters under their beds. We caught one inept would-be terrorist some years ago trying to set off an explosive charge in his shoe on a passenger airliner, and since then millions of people passing through airport security scans have been required to take off their shoes for testing. Husky grown men – invariably white; no African-American in his right mind would dare to – push their wives’ grocery carts through the aisles of Price Chopper with semi-automatic weapons conspicuously holstered on their hips. If you ask why (I don’t; I just leave), the answer has to do with self-protection: Bad guys out there.

Each of us, barring accidents, is equipped with a pair of tiny sets of neurons located deep inside his brain. It’s called the amygdala, and it has to do with recognizing and responding to stimulae. A person equipped with a high-functioning amygdala generally has a superior recall of names and faces; successful politicians are often conspicuous for this. But essentially the amygdala is the decider between the primeval choice of fight or flight. It triggers our responses to perceived dangers. And there, in modern times, lies the rub. We live in the 21st century, while our amygdalae are pretty much still in prehistory.

Once upon a time, an early hominid, hearing the grass beside him rustle, had to decide in an instant whether it was the wind or a saber-toothed tiger or dire wolf sneaking up on him. Obviously, the scaredy-cats among his extended family were the most likely to pass on their genes. Nowadays, the optimists have an equal chance to survive.

Unfortunately, the pessimists seem to have the edge in achieving positions of leadership and control. Usually raised authoritarian and valuing order and conformity over spontaneity and diversity, they still fear tigers in the grass. Robert Frost’s neighbor, carrying rocks “like an old-stone savage armed” to repair a wall, because “good fences make good neighbors,” is a perfect example. The long arm of the law (which in my youth was sometimes sitting on our front porch even before I got home) has grown much heavier in the post-911 age. Excited by the specter of kaffiyeh-wearing non-Christian strangers executing another outrage – not at all an existential threat to our country, but insulting and embarrassing to the authorities – many of us have become brutish and xenophobic. It’s nothing new; we’ve been this way in the past whenever “others” came here in search of opportunity or asylum. This is just another bad period.

However, either by calculated design or instinct, many of our representatives (whom authoritarians tend to characterize as “leaders”) have located our corporate Achilles’ heel: fear. Unscrupulous politicians have found more fertile ground in planting hate – “Send them back!” – than in appealing to Lincoln’s better angels of our nature. They’re succeeding, with outside help. I’m writing this before the Congressional testimony of Robert Mueller, but I’ll bet it will include a specific mention of Russian membership in our social media. It’s now a rule of thumb for me that if I feel an online discussion with someone I don’t personally know is leading to name-calling and division, rather than synthesis or agreement, it’s time to break it off. I can’t do Cyrillic characters with my keyboard, so it’s “Poka poka” – Bye bye.

Fighting with our fellow Americans over what amounts to trivia while our planet rapidly becomes too hot to sustain us seems supremely stupid. There are no lifeboats on this ship; this is it. If we let fear – and its child, anger – continue to get the better of us, we’ll deserve what’s coming. It won’t have been the wind rustling the grass; it will have been the saber-toothed tiger – also, coincidentally, extinct.