Courage is overrated. Commercialism, religion and politics demand that you be afraid of whatever it is "they" want you to remove, destroy or avoid when you buy their product.

There is an odd phrase, "the courage of your convictions". This basically demands that you be more afraid of one thing than another and to overcome the easier fear in order to eradicate the harder one.

Sport, business and military folk like to sell "courage" as bravery and dismiss "fear" as cowardice. The fact that they use intimidation on the impressionable, derision on the resistant, and outright hysteria on the defiant strongly suggests that the fact that money is involved means that one's "courage" can increase with one's bank account, if one is willing to do what "it" takes.

Fear is used to sell ideas that otherwise wouldn't be considered by the intelligent or the informed. The intelligent and informed, when they do consider fear, choose to use it as a tool and a scapegoat at the same time.

To the truly fearful, adding to their burden unnecessarily for the sake of business, fashion and politics is seen as a form of persecution. The world is full of enough uncertainty and safety issues without more being manufactured or imagined.

In the human mind, fear can perform a very useful function. It can get you off your butt and running away. No excuse for exercise should ever be discounted out of hand. It can get you to shut your door and turn off your lights and be quiet. Everybody needs a little time for meditation. It can strongly suggest that you don't go to work today. Any self-diagnosis is cheaper to a health organization than a consultation, and, besides, wouldn't you be proud of a co-worker who was honest?

Fashionable fear is to be shared by everyone. Only the fool-hardy and un-with-it will ignore a fear that everyone knows is real. Unfashionable fear is so "yesterday". You should not be afraid of something that everybody knows is just okay if you'd only stop thinking about it.