The first Europeans, as far as we know, to try to settle here were the Norse. Ill-equipped as they were with swords and spears against the long-range artillery of the natives’ bows and arrows, they wisely abandoned their attempts at settling what they called Vinland, and sailed home. But previous to that, imagine the thrill of apprehension that must have run through their stockaded village at the cry, “Here come the Skraelings!” When a viking calls you a barbarian, you’ve been dissed!

The British were next, hopefully setting up shop much farther south in Roanoke. To this day, no one knows what happened to those adventurers. It was in New England that immigrants finally made their mark. As soon as they got their feet under them, they began building stockades of their own. The Schenectady Massacre of 1690 and the Deerfield Massacre of 1704, instigated and led by French officials, proved what a perilous situation colonists were in. When the cry went up, folks skedaddled for the fort. The Smothers Brothers once had a discussion about whether Pilgrims ever swore. Dick said they were religious and never did. “Oh, yeah?” countered Tommy. “I’ll bet they didn’t say, ‘Here come those sweet Indians again.’”

Having to defend themselves comes most naturally to dominant cultures. With American troops scattered in more than one hundred other countries to enforce a Pax Ameticana, we’ve made ourselves prime targets. But more than that, embedded in our national psyche is the notion that, though professing righteousness, we’re guilty and have it coming. Sigmund Freud could have a wonderful time dissecting that one.

Some of the alarms – “The [fill in your choice] are coming!”­ – have nothing to do with our psyches. Paul Revere and his pals, galloping through the night to warn “every Middlesex village and farm” of the approaching British, weren’t conjuring up fears. The war had begun, and theirs was “a cry of defiance, and not of fear.”

Eight years later, with Lord Cornwallis and his troops gone home, we turned toward the problem of occupying and exploiting the lands and resources of the indigenous people. We signed multiple treaties guaranteeing them security in largely unwanted land we gave them as reservations – unwanted, that is, till an expedition led by George Custer started a gold rush obviating the Treaty of Laramie that had granted the Black Hills to the Sioux. The tribes got even with Custer in June of 1876.

But I digress. The point I’m after is that we live with a mixture of dread and guilt. In pre-Civil War days the Southern planters were quite outnumbered by their Black slaves, so set up “slave patrols” to monitor for unrest and threats, and brutally suppress any rebellion. The patrols are the “well-regulated militias” that our founders granted the Constitutional right to form and support. I believe a major source of what we perceive as police brutality today stems from those antebellum problems.

Since then, of course, we’ve perceived threats to be coming from various quarters. A line of defunct stone forts (including Fort Blunder on Lake Champlain) attest to our long-lasting paranoia about an invasion from Canada. The Treaty of Versailles, a perfectly American puritan document, was designed to humiliate the losers of the First World War. It worked, and led ineluctably to the Second World War.

In more recent years we’ve been threatened by fascist Germany, godless Soviet Communism, Chinese Communism and adventurism, and currently by “millions of illegal aliens” pouring over our southern border and raping, trafficking humans and drugs, pillaging, and murdering unchecked. It’s bad enough that people who would be our leaders are using that kind of rhetoric to scare us into line; what’s worse is that so many citizens of the Home of the Brave actually seem frightened.

Remember the tender love story in the film The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming? Would that such a thing could mark this season of bickering and insults. After all, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.