Boston. Paris. Brussels. San Bernardino. Istanbul. Baghdad. Jakarta. These are all places victimized by the terrorist attacks of the so-called Islamic State (not the official state of Islam) within the past three years. Various militant islamic groups have joined ISIS in the past few years, giving the group power around the world from Tunisia and Yemen to the Philippines and the Americas. To protect our country we must combat these terrorists by taking away their primary weapon: fear.

Fear is a very basic human emotion: when we are in any danger, we want to either run away or fight. This makes fear very dangerous, as it makes people irrational. ISIS and other groups (going back to medieval times) have used terror to provoke or incapacitate other nations.

Terrorist acts such as 9/11, the Paris attacks and the Brussels attacks led to flight delays, school shutdowns, panic and major political turmoil. ISIS eliminated less than one percent of the local population, but sent the rest of the population into a panic. People who are not even related to the terrorist target become fearful, as we could be the next target if we are not struck by lightning indoors before this occurs.

In their song “The Outsiders,” the group NeedToBreathe sings,  “if we aren’t laughing, who is laughing now?” This song is not connected directly to terrorism, speaking from a Christian perspective about the devil, but still holds true to this. The goal of terrorists is to defeat us via terror: to demoralize the West by making people scared. If we stop living due to the threat of terror, ISIS has defeated us. They celebrate whenever an attack occurs, but also when anyone responds negatively to the attacks. When we are scared of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (caliph of ISIS) is celebrating in his bunker.

Terrorist attacks and the like (i.e. school shootings) are terrible and likely the worst way to die, but we should not live in fear of them. FDR is famous for stating that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” This statement is possibly the most quoted presidential statement ever. In modern America, however, we cannot get over our fear of terrorism.

FDR said this statement during the Great Depression, and just before an existential war against Japan, Germany and Italy. We are currently facing, with the help of the rest of the world, a hundred thousand radical jihadists and a few psychopathic gunmen. Compare this to the millions of Germans, Italians and Japanese of World War II and an economic crisis. Roosevelt asked us not to fear either… and we suffer viscous fears of school shooters and a foreign army smaller than that of Turkey.

This is not to say that these are false threats: ISIS could attack America in the near future, or someone could attack our school. But we should not obsessively fear these threats, which are minuscule compared to the Nazis or the Soviet Union. If we stop being happy because of terror we are needlessly surrendering to evil. We should not let our great nation fall to fear: especially when that fear is undue.