Courageous Action Overcomes Fear

Fear is a powerful motivator. And sometimes a powerful de-motivator. Fear sometimes causes us to act, in both rational and irrational ways. Other times, fear paralyzes us from acting at all. This dominant emotion is so prevalent in our lives, we barely see its influence on our individual decisions, on our communal values, on our public policy.
Fear has so infected our common psyche that we don't even see how it shapes and molds how we view ourselves, and especially how we view others. 
The influence of fear can be seen in wars motivated by religious and ideological differences. It can be seen in the bloody gang wars on the streets of L.A. and Chicago. It can be seen in the fractional partisanship that paralyzes our country's leadership, and in Executive orders "banning" refugees from countries where radical Islamic ideology produces zealots that hate America. Fear's influence can even be seen in that radical ideology. 
Often, fear motivates the crimes that keep America's prisons bursting at the seams. It certainly motivates the legislative and judicial responses that have led to America's culture of incarceration. 
Fear is what keeps politicians from making radical changes to laws that are designed to be "tough on crime" but that yield no real differences in making communities safer. After all, one cannot appear to be "soft on crime" and keep a political position for long. 
Fear is what keeps communities from embracing their citizens who return from prison after serving their sentence. It's what keeps some employers from taking a chance on those returning citizens, and some landlords from renting to them.
Fear is what keeps some of these returning citizens from applying for a job, or from accepting the challenge of changing their thinking and behavior through educational and spiritual reformation.
In short, fear so dominates our lives that we have become accustomed to it. Perhaps even comforted by it. When fear motivates us, we have a convenient scapegoat for the choices we make. We have a ready excuse for our class warfare, for our racial conflict, for our religious intolerance, for our culture of incarceration, for our failure to act.
"Courage" is an antonym of the word "fear," so courageous action is an antidote. We should not deny our fears, but we should define them and seek to understand them. Only by understanding what we fear, who we fear, can we begin to act with courage. Fear need not define our behavior, restrict our creativity, paralyze our potential, or confine our spirit to that which is "safe." 
When we face our fears, defeat them even, we discover that what held us in bondage to inaction, what energized our hatred and intolerance, what crushed our creative problem solving, is often nothing more than a product of our own imagination. It is too often our over-generalization of one person's actions onto the motives and plans of others that drives us to fear them.
Let us not swallow our fears, for then we internalize them. Let us, instead, expose them to the sunshine of truth and burn away the rotten thinking that feeds them. Let us take courageous action to defeat our fears. Let us approach those we fear and get to know them. Let us take a chance at failure, not so we can retreat back into the safe haven of our fearful walls, but so we can learn from our failures and try something new. Let us learn to master our fear instead of submitting ourselves as slaves to this powerful tyrant.
Courage starts with you. How will you conquer your fears?