Since the terrorist attacks last year public policy in the US has legislated fear. We’ve been living with a prismatic alert system — orange, yellow, red, green — and a year later, no one seems to know what the colours mean. No one knows what we should do on “high alert” days, but we know we are supposed to be concerned about something.

This has been going on for more than a year, but there has been no repetition of 9/11, nothing even close. One could argue that this lack of fireworks is proof that vigilance works. But there is no reason to think that the various civil rights incursions — the 1,200 men held in jails without charge, the funny way they use these radar sticks to check shoes in airports — are making any difference. After all, the terrorists did not fool airport staff: they took on board nothing that should have been stopped at the gate.

But as Michael Moore shows in his documentary Bowling For Columbine, we did not need 9/11 to make ourselves miserable. His film uses the Columbine High School killings as its refrain for an examination of violence in the US. What Moore discovers is that Americans like owning guns a lot, and believe it is for their own good. Everyone is protecting himself against crime.

The trouble is, these people are defending themselves against dangers that don’t exist. According to the Justice Department, violent crime fell 15 per cent from 1999 to 2000. Furthermore, 67 per cent of these crimes did not involve an armed offender, and only 6 per cent of rapes and sexual assaults included a weapon of any kind. From 1993 to 2000, violent crimes were reduced by 40 per cent, and rapes fell by 60 per cent. The only new variety of crime since 1993 is student shooting sprees in high schools.

And these schools are all in white America, where everyone runs to set up alarm systems designed by Nasa engineers and the like, to protect themselves from, yes, crime. If you ask Americans who live in gated communities in suburbia why they have moved, they will say that it’s to protect their children from crime. What crime? And they cannot quite say, but they are sure that if they lived somewhere else, they would be victims of burglary, assault, murder, rape and riot. None of them, of course, fears a teenage shooting spree.

I, on the other hand, live in New York City, I am a single woman in a second-storey apartment with no bars on my window — and, idiot that I am, I don’t own a gun. I walk around the streets late at night, alone, because I know the statistics: crime in New York City is down 44 per cent in the past decade.

You know what else? I am so crazy that I am not afraid of another terrorist attack, even though I lived only 50 yards from the World Trade Centre. And I am not the sole fool among the victims: only a third of the people who were in the attack suffered post-traumatic stress disorder — but 90 per cent of the rest of the country went through it in the aftermath.

And this fear has been reinforced time and again by our Government, which has used it as an excuse to do whatever the hell it wants. The Patriot Act, which has nothing to do with patriotism — we all know it is downright un-American to deprive citizens of their civil rights — was rushed through Congress without anyone thinking to question it.

Which is a terrible thing, because one of the greatest things about America is that we are the only country that has a Bill of Rights to protect us from our own Government. Because it is absolutely American to question authority, and to do it boldly and bravely. But somehow, we have been kept in victim mode, in the guise of fighting terror.

I hate this. I find myself wanting to run around the streets saying: This is America! We are the mightiest nation on earth! We invented Disneyland! We created Elvis! We have nothing to fear! In fact, it was in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor that Roosevelt reminded us that the only thing we had to fear is fear itself. What would he do now when he discovered that being scared had become a lifestyle choice?

The author wrote Prozac Nation