Overheard in a friendly conversation at our dinner table a few years ago: “I don’t know why anyone would want to live there. It’s so dirty.”

And then, the banter about Mobile’s sister city to the west came to a screeching halt as our daughter’s eyes flashed with annoyance bordering on anger. New Orleans is her home now, and the perception of it as dirty and dangerous offended her.

No surprise there. People are defensive about the place they call home.

Recently, our whole country was horrified as we learned about a carload of Americans being sprayed with gunfire after they crossed the Rio Grande into the Mexican border town of Matamoros. Two were killed and the other two wounded as they were on their way to a medical appointment.

Setting aside the shameful reality that Americans routinely travel to Mexico and Canada for cheaper medical care, it’s downright horrifying that these innocent Americans from South Carolina apparently were mistaken for Haitian drug dealers and were shot by real Mexican drug dealers.

Matamoros is a very different place from the one I visited many years ago, when my biology teacher and his wife led a gaggle of us teenagers across the bridge at Brownsville and into Matamoros. Back then, it was a common thing. People could stroll across the bridge — no paperwork required — to shop or drink or engage in a variety of vices. They did not encounter gunmen with automatic weapons.

That was then. Now — in an exercise in free-market economics that would make Adam Smith proud — America’s hearty appetite for drugs and Mexico’s desire for guns make the dangers of the place I visited as a high school girl very real.

But not unique or even unusual.

Danger is a perception, and a useful one.

It’s an old saw now that Mexico is a dangerous place. The stereotype says it’s full of people who are drug dealers, violent, brown, Catholic and, most of all, different from those who style themselves as God-fearing, white, Protestant and American

If you are Mexican, or even if you aren’t, that politically useful “old saw” is offensive.

Nobody likes to hear their home criticized.

Years after my schoolgirl trip south of the border, my husband and I were shopping for our first house. We met with an agent who was a former snowbird who’d decided to roost permanently in Baldwin County. A gregarious woman, she began telling us about herself. She was doing fine until she crowed, “My friends up North couldn’t understand why I moved to Al – a – bam -a.” She stretched each syllable with a sneer.

She lost what could have been any easy sale.

Europeans, including Adolf Hitler, used to characterize the United States as a place full of “gangsters.” Right now, plenty of would-be visitors are terrified of America as a place where (they believe) everyone carries a gun and the natives know not to honk in traffic for fear of being shot to death.

After all, the murder rate in the United States (4.96 per 100,000 people, per year) is huge when compared to Norway (.47 per 100,000 people, per year) or even England or France (1.20 per 100,000 people, per year).

Are we that much more violent than the nation which brought us Jack the Ripper, or the land in which my artist ancestor, Jacques-Louis David, vowed to color his paints with the blood of aristocrats?

It’s a simple — and controversial — fact that we have the means to kill and they don’t. But that’s a discussion for another day. It’s also a fact that the perception of danger is just that — a perception.

It’s a valuable one, to be sure. Back in 2016, an unfortunate young man who was in town to plan his wedding was walking in a part of New Orleans where most of us would drive with our eyes open and our windows shut. He didn’t perceive danger when he should have, and was robbed and murdered. There are plenty of people who would read that and eschew the Crescent City altogether.

Twenty years ago, I had a co-worker who carried a revolver in her car’s glove compartment. She told me she started “packing” when she began working in downtown Mobile. “I carry it for protection,” she said.

My husband jokes that when he starts carrying a weapon “for protection,” it’ll be a .45-caliber Thompson machine gun — with a sack of hand grenades for good measure. He also likes to needle people like my former co-worker by asking, “Where is this place you’re going that you’ll have to fight for your life?”

Where, indeed?

The ability to gauge a place as dangerous is critical to life. The perception of danger that keeps our 2-year-old grandson from taking a header off the dining room table he loves to climb on is primal. Perceptions about dangerous places and dangerous people are learned as we reach adulthood.

The primal nature of fear keeps us alive — and exposes us.

However, as much as you must be careful what you wish for, be careful what you fear. The perception of danger is a stalking horse behind which evil can hide. Fear is an essential, but also a risky, part of life.

From the streets of New Orleans that you may see as grimy, to the border city (now combat zone) I visited as a teenager, be thoughtful about the fear you perceive. We all have a built-in echo chamber that can magnify fear beyond reason. Those who would manipulate you know this and can use your fears to their ends.

So be thoughtful and careful, and then consider the advice of Confederate Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson: “Never take counsel of your fears.”

Frances Coleman is a former editorial page editor of the Mobile Press-Register. Email her at [email protected] and “like” her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/prfrances.