Every age has its own fears.

These days, it’s terrorism. For a decade now, ever since a beautiful September morning in New York City, we as a nation have been jittery that any moment an explosives-laden airplane or shoe or, God help us, pair of underwear will send us to the hereafter. Such are the hazards of life in the early 21st Century.

I’ve always maintained that we’re lucky terrorists are, by and large, not an overly bright bunch. If they were smart, they’d hit someplace like Fargo or Bismarck or Columbia, Mo., places in the interior of the country that are smaller and where the damage could be much worse, proportionately. A single suitcase bomb could take out much of Fargo’s downtown and it would scare the living daylights out of the entire country, because it would show we wouldn’t be safe anywhere.

You have more of a chance of being struck by lightning than killed by a terrorist bomb, but between people’s general irrationality and the government’s campaign to whip us into a froth, it seems to be what people are afraid of these days.

It’s almost hard to remember that not all that long ago, people worried about something that probably was a bigger threat: nuclear annihilation. For just shy of half a century, people worried about whether they could be instantly vaporized because some guy they didn’t know, and who lived half a world away, gave the word or pushed a button or turned a key. The world could be reduced to a smoking cinder in less time than it would take you to read this newspaper.

I don’t remember the Cuban missile crisis – I was just shy of 4 years old when it happened – but reading the memories of people who lived through it, even everyday people, is a bit creepy. It’s the closest the world ever came to all-out thermonuclear war and from all accounts, the world came very, very close. But for a couple of decisions, neither I nor anybody else would have made it to their next birthday.

It was a time when, unlike now, state power was everywhere more important than the power of individual groups. A kind of insanity gripped most of the world’s governments. It was bad enough that the U.S. and other governments – notably those of the Soviet Union and China – conducted proxy wars in far-flung backwaters, places that became killing fields for young men who hadn’t even known those countries’ names a year or two earlier. But piled on top of that, and adding to it, was the sickening realization that such proxy wars had the advantage of staving off worldwide holocaust.

North Dakota, of course, would have been one of the first places denuded of life. I recall hearing that had it been an independent country during the Cold War, the Flickertail State would have been the world’s third-largest nuclear power, what with all the missile silos.

There was even a genre of literature that the writer Ron Rosenbaum calls “nuclear porn,” novels like “On the Beach” that told the story of nuclear holocaust and its few survivors. Porn indeed. Even “Dr. Strangelove,” one of the funniest comedy films ever made, takes nuclear war as its premise. Watching it is almost literally like whistling past the bone yard.

Some of what was done to “calm” the populace looks quaint now. There’s a film called “Atomic Café” that’s a collection of excerpts from 1950s nuclear-preparedness films that were intended to sell the public on the idea that nuclear war was survivable. The most famous excerpt features Burt the Turtle, a cartoon character used to teach people the “duck and cover” they were supposed to do when the Russkies lit us up. You watch it with disbelieving laughter; you have to wonder if anybody really believed it. (It came out years later that the government was fully aware that “duck and cover” was useless, but they figured they had to give the masses something approaching hope for survival. Kind of like taking your shoes off at the airport is now.)

You still occasionally hear concerns about some terrorist group getting ahold of a nuclear bomb, or some dictatorial loony like Kim Jong Il returning to the good old days of nuclear brinkmanship. But either possibility is treated as so remote that we’re much more at risk from exploding boxer shorts. I’m not at all sure that’s true, but that seems to be what the government tells us, at least by the way it acts.

What’s interesting is that the kind of measures we take as a nation don’t make much more sense than “duck and cover.” The late, unlamented color-coded threat levels were a joke. The airport security measures protect us from what’s already been done, but God help us all if Osama’s successors come up with a new way to make us bleed. They’re like prison inmates who come up with ingenious ways of making weapons in their cells; they’ve got all the time in the world to be creative and we can’t hope to know what they’ll come up with, really.

Maybe, in some twisted way, we can’t live without fear. There’s much that is different about fear of nuclear bombs and fear of terrorism, but it’s only details. Whichever kills us, we’ll be just as dead. And if it isn’t one of those things we need to fear, it’ll be Satanic child abuse or poisoned Halloween candy or roving bands of street thugs who don’t look like us.

Just remember one thing: When you fear, you want to hand over control of your life to the first person who promises you security. Maybe, more than anything else, we should be afraid of that.