Once again, an item in the news has me questioning whether I really live in the “Home of the Brave” celebrated in our National Anthem.

Raising such a question is a bit risky, since there are those who will read the above as being disrespectful of our soldiers, sailors, police officers, firemen or the three American tourists who stopped a guy from shooting up a French train heading for Paris. I assure you that this is not about those men and women, for what they do requires courage. I recognize and appreciate the courage it takes to confront a possibly dangerous felon or an obviously dangerous terrorist.

Moreover, I know such bravery isn’t confined to those groups. This morning, I read of a minister who was shot attempting to subdue a man trying to shoot his ex-girlfriend during a service, and in the past I have read of teachers and students who have acted bravely in the face of terrorism. I also remember a story a few years ago about a young woman who calmly talked a man — who had taken refuge in her apartment and was holding her hostage — into surrendering peacefully.

But those are acts of individual bravery, and I’m talking about our society as a whole, which seems to be perennially afraid and frequently panics at the drop of a microchip, as happened in a Texas school last week.

You probably have read about the boy who enjoys making things and wants to be an engineer. He turned a pencil case into a digital clock at home and took it to school to show his teacher. For some reason, the teacher perceived the clock as a threat, probably because it resembled a digital clock set to trigger a bomb, like the one James Bond stopped just in time to save Fort Knox in the movie “Goldfinger.” Many people have said the student’s name, Ahmed Mohamed, was probably a factor in the teacher’s reaction, and given our society’s current fear of all things Islamic, I’m inclined to agree.

Whatever frightened the teacher scared the school administration too, so they called police who arrested the 14-year-old freshman. Ahmed told them it was just a clock, which was the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but the police weren’t happy with that and wanted him to say more. What else was there for him to say, though? So the police handcuffed him and hauled him off to the station and, without allowing him to talk to his parents, they interrogated him about it for an hour before finally concluding that the device was not an attempt to blow up the school or even to scare a teacher into thinking it was.

American schools these days are extremely sensitive to safety, and it’s understandable. It doesn’t take many photos showing the aftermath of an attack like the one in Connecticut three years ago to make you believe such a thing could happen to your school. To that end, schools have strictly prohibited bringing firearms to school, and a student who does so is usually expelled.

Maybe that’s understandable, but maybe it’s overkill. In the world I taught in, it wasn’t uncommon for a student to get up early on an autumn morning and bag a deer before breakfast. If, in his rush to make it to his first class without being tardy, he forgot to leave his rifle at home before taking his pickup to the school parking lot and locking it, he would be expelled for his forgetfulness. His expulsion wouldn’t make his schoolmates one bit safer.

That’s what fear does. It leads us to take extreme, and often useless, measures and set policies that have unforeseen bad consequences. In reality, a school can’t be sterilized to eliminate every possible danger, especially a danger existing only in a teacher’s imagination, nor can it be made safer by turning it into an armed camp without doing damage to the school’s actual mission.

That’s the sort of fear I am talking about, and America is full of such fears. Space doesn’t allow me to discuss them fully now, so you will have to wait for another column, maybe even two. Meanwhile, here are a few fears I might talk about.

Since the 9/11 attacks, we have been terrified of Islam. There are somewhere between 2.5 and 3 million Muslims in the U.S. and there are those who believe every one of them is a terrorist-in-waiting.

The current Republican primary has highlighted illegal immigrants as something scary. One candidate tells us they are all violent criminals and they are pushing us “regular” people out of all the jobs.

Other things that inspire fear include Wall Street, science that produces such things as genetically modified crops, and changes in culture, such as the increasing acceptance of homosexuality.

Finally, there’s a guy called Barack Obama that a certain political party has used to terrify Americans for almost eight years.

It sounds as though I have a lot to write about, so I’d better turn this column in and start working on another.

I’ll be back.