Gene Policinski: Putting 9/11 fear aside in favor of freedom

  “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt said in March 1933 — speaking in his first inaugural address to a desperate and fearful nation wracked by the Great Depression.

  Those same words, which perhaps would be sent today as a tweet from PrezFDR.gov, translate well to today’s war on terror as we mark the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001.

  Fear has been called the terrorists’ greatest weapon, with the power to turn neighbor against long-time neighbor; to prompt cowardly, middle-of-the-night bomb threats to a Murfreesboro mosque; and to spark unprecedented intrusions on some of our civil rights in the name of safety and security.