I wanted to take a break from the usual sports/culture posts on this blog to discuss two subjects that have always fascinated me – fear and its companion, anger.

Indeed, anger is often the result of fear.

There’s a lot of both in America these days, the kind of fear that leads to prejudice, rage, indecency, betrayal, disrespect, destructiveness – madness.

It was President Franklin D. Roosevelt who told Americans in the depths of the Great Depression that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” It’s worth putting that quote in context as it comes within the first paragraph of his First Inaugural Address in 1933: ...