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I say, “I’ve got troops? Really? Will they do whatever I tell them? If I tell them to take out the dams on the Columbia River will they do that?”

More silence, until she says, “This is why I only call you every few weeks. I’ll be in touch.”

We are no longer children. It is dangerous to us and to others to maintain the illusion that we are responsible for the destruction, an illusion that may have been appropriate when we were powerless. But we are not.

I remember the decision I made in my mid-twenties to pursue my life as a writer. I was scared to do this. I did not have sufficient self-confidence, I thought, to follow my dreams. I traced this lack of confidence to the abuse I’d suffered as a child. Part of my father’s modus operandi—and I recognized this while very young—was that any time any one of us children (or our mother) revealed that something was important to us, one of three things would happen: he might use that thing as a form of payment for cooperation in his sexual abuse (I was interested in the Civil War as a child, and we took long trips to see battlefields, but at what cost?); he might use the promise of this thing to build up hopes so he could watch our faces as he dashed them; or he might simply destroy the thing itself in front of our eyes. I learned to not express my dreams.

I recognized in my mid-twenties that because of this abuse, I would have the best excuse in the entire world to not follow my dreams of becoming a writer. Who could blame me after what I’d been through? Mere emotional survival was triumph enough.

The choice quickly came to this: I could go the rest of my life with an airtight excuse for not doing what I wanted; or I could go the rest of my life doing what I wanted. It took me only a few months to decide which it would be.

As a consequence of the belief that violence done to us is our own fault—or sometimes more simply because we do not want to be violated—we often become self-policing. I write this on an airplane flying home from giving talks. A friend took me to the airport. As we pulled into the parking lot we saw a uniformed man whose job it is, evidently, to search every car that enters.

I said, “I can’t believe this.”

“Do you want to not go in?”

I thought of the words I’d been told years before by a police officer when I’d commented that drivers licenses are in essence government “identity papers” we’re “asked” to produce at least as often as people were in those old black-and-white movies of resistance against Nazis. He didn’t appreciate my film reference, and told me, “If you don’t like it, don’t drive.”

I also considered the checkpoints and travel limits heroes always faced in those movies, and the absolute necessity of such restrictions under repressive regimes. I thought of the comment I’d received more recently when I’d complained as an “airport security agent” put her fingers against the skin of my lower belly beneath the waistband of my pants. I’d asked her what she was doing.

She’d responded, “This is for your safety and the safety of others.”

“You putting your hand inside my pants doesn’t make anyone safer.”

She’d said, “Flying is a privilege, not a right. If you don’t like it, stay home.”

I’d begun to disagree, and she’d motioned to a nearby cop. I’d had a plane to catch, and so I’d had a choice: I could make a scene, or I could get the hell out of Austin, Texas. I got the hell out of Austin, Texas.

Back at the airport parking lot, my friend said, “Let’s just go ahead and park. Let them search the car. We have nothing to hide.”

We looked at each other, shook our heads, and laughed.

This laughter kept us from cursing.

I’m not sure that’s such a good thing.

I don’t mean to suggest we should override every fear. I’m not sure we should override any fear. Fears should at least be listened to, whether or not we act on them. But I did not want to live a life based on fear. To live a life following my heart was important enough to me that I was willing to move into, through, and beyond this fear to my life on the other side.