The late, and much beloved journalist Molly Ivins loved to use her best Texas folkloric material to make a point. I heard her speak 15 months ago at an International Women’s Media Foundation awards luncheon in New York, where she was among the women honored.

The story she told that most bears repeating is about her old pal John Henry Faulk, who, as a boy of six, went with his seven-year-old friend, Boots Cooper, to “rid the family henhouse of a harmless chicken snake.” From its high perch on the wooden shelf, the snake frightened the two kids, who scrambled and clawed each other in their haste to escape. When Falk’s mother later reminded the boys that chicken snakes don’t hurt people, Boots Cooper responded, ‘Yes, ma’am, but some things will scare you so bad, you’ll hurt yourself.’

What a parable. “Don’t you know, that’s what we do again and again in this country,” Ivins loved to say. She felt that Americans too frequently surrender their civil liberties to allay their fears of such menaces as communism, crime, drugs, illegal aliens, and terrorists. “We think we can make ourselves safer by making ourselves less free,” Molly said. “I’ll tell you something: When you make yourselves less free, all that happens afterwards is that you’re less free. You are not safer.”

You can quibble with the point she makes politically, but the truth revealed about fear is great. What are you scared of, and is your fear hurting you more than whatever scares you?