On the night of August 14th, an eruption of fear grew out of an erroneous report of an active shooter at John F. Kennedy International Airport. Photograph by Xinhua / Wang Ying via Getty

Labor Day was once a significant date in American politics—the traditional kickoff of Presidential campaigns, the Monday when, in 1960, John F. Kennedy, the Democratic candidate, gave his first campaign speech, in Detroit, in Cadillac Square, appealing to the working men and women for whom Labor Day was invented. If that’s now an antique notion in an age when campaigns are constant, this year’s holiday is likely to mark a time for more venom, and remind us that the most distressing contest in memory will go on for another two months.

Kennedy and his Republican opponent, Richard M. Nixon, spoke in a time of Cold War tension: Russia had recently shot down a U-2, an American spy plane, and a summit meeting, in Paris, with President Eisenhower and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev was cancelled; the Russians, by launching Sputnik, in 1957, had won the first round of what was once called “the space race.” But the candidates were nonetheless speaking to a confident, strong, and innovative country, a place where Americans want to believe they still live. Instead, especially from the Republican candidate, Donald J. Trump, we get a portrait of an alarmed, even passive nation, cowed by China on trade and by guerrilla terror sponsored by the Islamic State. He promises to “Make America Safe Again,” saying things like “This summer, there has been an ISIS attack launched outside the war zones of the Middle East every eighty-four hours,” the sort of assertion that makes it easy to conflate geography, numbers, and motives and believe that the United States is somehow under regular assault by radical Islamic terrorists. In promising that a Trump Administration “will aggressively pursue joint and coalition military operations to crush and destroy” the Islamic State, he seems to be hinting at an eagerness to send more American ground troops to the Middle East, an idea that recent history suggests is a very bad one.

By contrast, when Trump’s Democratic opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, makes the anodyne assertion that “we and our allies must work hand in hand to dismantle the networks that move money and propaganda and arms and fighters across the world,” she sounds almost stateswomanlike. But Clinton, too, has sounded ready to conduct what seems very much like another Mideast war, as when she told the Council on Foreign Relations that the time has come “to smash the would-be caliphate and deny ISIS control of territory in Iraq and Syria.” That smashing, she said, “starts with a more effective coalition air campaign, with more allied planes, more strikes and a broader target set,” adding that “we should be honest about the fact that, to be successful, air strikes will have to be combined with ground forces actually taking back more territory from ISIS.”

One way no__t to deal with the threats we face is with the sort of overheated language heard at the Republican National Convention, in July, from, among others, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who said, “We are at war with radical Islamists. They are determined to kill us. They are stronger than we admit. And are greater in number than we admit. And there is no substitute for victory.” If the nation was on edge after recent attacks in Orlando and Nice and at airports in Brussels and Turkey, among other places, that sort of rhetoric doesn’t help.

We’ve seen symptoms of an on-edge nation in several scares, at malls and airports, most recently at Los Angeles International Airport. As it happens, I witnessed one of these a couple of weeks ago, on the night of August 14th, at John F. Kennedy International Airport, when an eruption of fear grew out of a report that an active shooter was somewhere in Terminal 8. (Among the excellent personal accounts was one by New York magazine’s David Wallace-Wells, who was on the same eight-hour Norwegian Air flight, from Copenhagen, as my wife and me; another was by Brandon Webb, a former Navy Seal, who had flown with Lufthansa, from Frankfurt, and had some helpful survival tips.) The resulting panic probably began with Usain Bolt’s victory in the hundred-metre dash, at the Rio Olympics, which led to cheering that, with the aid of imaginative aural leaps, sounded like explosions. At least that remains the “operating theory,” according to the Port Authority. For my wife and me, it began when we joined a large, unmoving crowd close to the passport area and, a little past ten P.M., lights began flashing, sirens went off, and security personnel began shouting, “Get down!” Customs and Border Patrol officers and Port Authority police, some with guns drawn and some carrying tactical weapons, came running, in search of a shooter, and, as we lay flat, the sound of their shoes on a hard surface made it easy to believe we were hearing the pop-pop-pop of an automatic weapon. It was as if we’d learned to expect it, to think, So,_ this_ is what it’s like to be in one of those situations. All that was missing at J.F.K. were bullets, and a shooter.

Also missing was a sense that the security people—who were considerate and acted bravely in the face of unknown risks—actually knew what was going on. They were unable to offer real information, or guidance, to the panicked arriving and departing passengers, who were being ordered to turn back and head to the tarmac, and more than once told to get down on the floor. The confusion, even terror, is what prompted the New York Senator Charles E. Schumer to ask the Department of Homeland Security to investigate the airport’s security procedures, saying that what happened “raises very disturbing questions about the state of preparedness and coördination of response if—heaven forbid—a real attack were to occur.” (The Port Authority, in response, says that it’s “working with our federal, state and city law enforcement partners on a top-to-bottom review of the JFK incident,” and that “improved communication with the traveling public—particularly in terminals” will be a priority.)

The all-clear at Terminal 8 came at about eleven-thirty, but the shakiness lingered. Along an unmoving walkway, one could see shoes, clothing, and abandoned suitcases, the sort of detritus one might encounter after an actual terror attack. On the way home, as the flashing lights of emergency vehicles receded, it was natural to think that our (still) great but jittery and unprepared nation is approaching an epochal moment that will conclude with a choice between two less-than-epochal Presidential candidates, one of whom, Trump, is a divisive loudmouth. Fifteen years after the attacks of 9/11, the upcoming election ought to remind us how important it is to think clearly, and resourcefully, about the threats we actually face. Looking through the prism of the panics at J.F.K., L.A.X., and elsewhere, one might conclude that what we really have to fear is exaggerated fear itself.