A lesson in fear ~ my column from Sunday's paper

NOTE: I used a piece of one of my posts last week in this column.

Fear is an interesting emotion. Most of the things I’ve feared in my life never happened. They were figments of my imagination.

Fear sometimes caused me to say and do things I regretted after the threat of danger had passed.

When I was a kid, the closest dentist was in the town of Cordova. The town was about eight miles away from our house and was situated near the banks of the Warrior River.

I HATED going to Cordova. It wasn’t just going to the dentist; it was because I was afraid of riding over the old bridge into town.

The steel structure had a wooden roadbed. Over the years, the bridge deteriorated and the ends of some of the boards broke off and fell into the river. The bolts fastening the wood to the structure had worked loose and rattled when cars or trucks drove over it.

My mother always drove slowly across that bridge. We had a 1957 Buick which weighed just slightly less than one of the Great Pyramids, and she always feared it was too heavy for the ancient structure.

Even driving slowly, the clattering sound of the wood on steel was almost deafening.

A few times, I conjured up enough courage to look out the windows as we crossed that bridge. In places, you could see through the missing ends of boards all the way to the water 40 feet below.

To say it made me uneasy would have been an understatement. In fact, my rear end almost chewed holes in the upholstery during those infrequent dentist trips. It was enough to make me brush my teeth with more diligence.

It wasn’t the bridge itself I feared, but images I conjured up of us plunging into the depths of the river and being trapped in the back seat as the ink-black water rushed in through the cracks and slowly turned the passenger compartment into an aquarium. By the time we arrived at the dentist’s office, I was usually exhausted. Fear does that to you.

Facebook is a blessing and a curse. I love looking at Facebook on special holidays when people are sharing pictures of the family and kids.

But during election time the posts on Facebook often get mean spirited. I try to keep my views on politics, religion and hot-button topics to myself because I prefer not to add to the noise.

Some of the things I saw on Facebook after the Paris attack and the subsequent backlash about America accepting Syrian refugees looked almost like headlines from the National Enquirer.

People are filled with fear and the thing that concerns me is we’re letting a handful of terrorists rule our thinking and our lives.

The only real thing these savages can do is to instill fear. This is their weapon of mass disruption. If they can make us fearful, have they not already won the battle?

Autumn berries