This is an opinion column.

Fear. It makes you do things. Often uncharacteristic things. Or things that linger deep in our core, buried and dormant.

Yet often, too, things we’ve been dying to do.

Fear stresses us, releasing hormones cortisol and adrenaline, science tells us. It jacks up our heart rate and blood pressure, reroutes blood flowing away from our heart towards our limbs, “making it easier for you to start throwing punches or run for your life, according to Northwestern Medicine, a publication of Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago.

“Your body is preparing for fight-or-flight,” NM says.

Of course, every action creates a counter.

The amygdala is that part of our brain that toggles our emotions. According to those smart folks at the Northwestern School of Medicine, when the amygdala senses fear, our cerebral cortex goes kerflooey.

That’s not good. The cerebral cortex houses our reasoning, our judgement. Call it our common dang sense.

“As a result,” concludes NM, “you might scream and throw your hands up when approached by an actor in a haunted house, unable to rationalize that the threat is not real.”

Well, that explains it right there. Explains it all. Explains why Alabama’s state leaders, lawmakers, and a few regular folks have gone kerflooey over threats they’ve conjured in their brains.

My columnist colleagues have had a lot of fun variously labeling our state. John Archibald says Alabama is a State of Indifference, perhaps afflicted by a defiance disorder. (Maybe those Northwestern folks will offer a diagnosis.)

Kyle Whitmire tabs us as a State of Denial.

I want in: Call us a State of Fear.

On the playground, all the other kids are taunting us. Scaredy cats. Scaredy cats. Scaredy, scaredy, scaredy cats.

Deservedly. Our lawmakers and governor fear anything they don’t understand. So, they go kerflooey. They create a law denying parents the right to obtain gender-affirming treatments for their trans child.

Kerflooey.

They fear a woman may choose her own body, her own life, her own future, her own health with which they disagree, so they go kerflooey. They strip her of the right to make that choice, then threaten to prosecute folks who may help transport the woman to a place that does not fear—or condemn—her choice.

Some folks in Prattville, Foley, and elsewhere fear books. Books. Books containing things they don’t understand or agree with. So, they’ve gone kerflooey. They want to “clean up” libraries of children’s and young adult books that discuss LGBTQ matters (especially gender identity) and sex.

They demand this kerflooey while waving the flag of “parents’ rights”—as if their rights matter more than the rights of parents who do not fear books. Parents who do not fear their children will become gay if they read a book containing a gay character. Or want to become a drag queen if one reads a book to them—and more than they’ll want to be a clown if someone with a big red nose reads them a story.

Our governor recently co-signed this kerflooey in a missive to Nancy Pack, who leads the Alabama Public Library Service.

Folks, we shouldn’t really even have ever heard of Pack or the APLS. They guide libraries, for goodness’ sake. Libraries.

Libraries are gold mines. They’re theme parks. They’re open vaults of knowledge, ideas, perspectives, and thought.

They’re storehouses for what was, is, and can be.

In libraries, we have nothing to fear but fear. Witless fear.

Yet Gov. Ivey pacified the pitch folks coming for your library.

“I respect parents who want their young children and teens to be able to freely explore a library without fear (my emphasis) of what those children will find there,” she wrote to Pack.

Kerflooey.

Of course, we’ve long known Alabama fears Black voters. Fears Black thought. Fears Black knowledge.

Alabama slave owners once feared that if their enslaved learned to read, they’d rise up and revolt against their condition. Or simply be smarter than them.

Pretty damn scary.

Just a few decades ago, Alabama’s fear of the Black vote cost men and women their safety, their homes, their lives.

In Selma, throughout other parts of Lowndes’ County, and in cities across the state half a century ago, poll taxes, unconscionable quizzes, and more often than we care to admit, the barrel end of a gun stood between Black Alabamians and the right to vote.

Today, the offspring of that fear are pouting their way back to the U.S. Supreme Court after it ruled the state’s gerrymandered U.S. House districts were racist. That they diluted, demeaned, and defused Black voters.

No, they don’t, touted state Attorney General Steve Marshall. (State of Denial) We want a do-over. (State of Defiance)

Three federal judges were clearly indignant that state leaders essentially traced over the same racist maps previously ruled to be racist and ordered a special mapmaker to create the maps instead. (Summation of their latest: Why are you back here?)

Now, our secretary of state, Wes Allen, has the bold-face audacity to claim SCOTUS is racist. In arguing that the court should issue an emergency stay of the redrawing state congressional districts, he said the new maps “will intentionally segregate Alabamians based on race.”

Talk about the pot calling … I’ll stop.

Fear. Fear of now. Fear of change. Fear of truth.

Fear … it’s making them do things. Things lingering deep in their core, things buried, dormant.

Things they’ve been dying to do.

What do Ivey, Marshall, Allen, and state Republicans fear? Why does the prospect of just two out of the state’s seven congressional districts scare the kerflooey out of the state’s Republicans?

Why do Black voters scare them—especially when they incessantly profess to want to attract Black voters?

Maybe they fear Black voters will rise up and revolt against their condition. Or simply be smarter than them.

They may be right.

More columns by Roy S. Johnson

Clarence Thomas and Republicans are mocking us all.

Goodbye to an ‘uncle’ who stepped into the gap to help raise two father boys into men

Alabama’s non-parole board shows we’re not serious about prison, justice reform

Do we want our children to go to school or prison? State funding levels provide an answer

‘Skinny-shamed’ as a youth, Birmingham mom now a champion bodybuilder

I’m a Pulitzer Prize finalist for commentary, a member of the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame, and winner of the Edward R. Murrow prize for podcasts for “Unjustifiable,” co-hosted with John Archibald. My column appears in AL.com, as well as the Lede. Check out my new podcast series “Panther: Blueprint for Black Power,” which I co-host with Eunice Elliott. Subscribe to my free weekly newsletter, The Barbershop, here. Reach me at [email protected], follow me at twitter.com/roysj, or on Instagram @roysj