Being afraid isn't very useful usually. However, being prepared often is useful

The Boy Scout motto always was: "Be Prepared". You might ask for what?

But, maybe the most important thing is psychologically being prepared for literally anything. 

In some ways growing up in the 1950s and being told I was going to die in a nuclear war as a soldier actually helped me in this.

First of all, by the time I was 14 I realized I might not die in a nuclear war at all if there weren't one. And 2nd I started to realize that there were things like 2S or student deferments from the draft in the early 1960s. However, the draft didn't end until the late 1970s after Nixon was forced to resign as president then.

So, I started to have hope in my early teens that I wasn't going to necessarily die in a nuclear war as a soldier. However, like I said before I prepared for whatever was going to come by studying about nuclear weapons and all kinds of weapons and by 10 I already was a crack shot with my .22 rifle that my grandmother from Texas gave me when I was 8 years old. So, I kept my rifle and bullets in my bedroom closet to protect my family which was traditional for at least 400 years or more before that for especially boys the family trusted to use these weapons only to protect the family from bad people or critters.

In fact, the last time I remember shooting anything was a Green Mojave Sidewinder Rattlesnake whose venom is 9 times more powerful than a diamondback rattler. Normally I would have left it alone but it was trying to crawl in the back door of a house with a lot of people inside so I got my .22 pistol and shot it several times until it was dead at a far enough distance where it couldn't strike at me.

So, like I said being prepared is what is important even if it is psychologically being prepared for literally anything in your life.

Two young ladies in a Mercedes asked my wife for help at a gas station in Buellton near Santa Barbara. They were not able to take off the cap to put more air pressure in one of their rear tires. So, my wife volunteered me to help them. So, I walked over and asked where the cap to the air valve was that they wanted me to remove. They showed me but it's location on the ornate wheel of a Mercedes didn't give anyone enough leverage to actually remove the cap with their bare fingers. So, I told them I had pliers in my truck and one girl said, "Pliers?" which likely meant she didn't know what pliers were or what I was going to do with them?

So, I got a pair of pliers in the side of my truck where people keep bottles of water or soda in the door and came back and was able to turn 1/2 turn so I could twist the cap off. I gave one girl who was driving the cap.

I did what they requested and no more in a very straightforward and polite way. If they had asked me useful questions I might have done more to help them but I didn't want to make them feel ignorant about mechanical things the way people are today.

So, did I do the right thing to do what they asked and nothing more?

Oh, I also showed them how to depress the valve to get air to come out of the tire if they put too much air in the tire.

Thinking back likely the car told them that one tire was too high or low. But, what I have found is that often the tire pressure these mechanisms are indicating are often the spare tire which often is just an emergency donut tire and not very useful unless you put it on the back wheel of a two wheel front wheel drive vehicle. Because you don't want your donut on one of the wheels that steer the car or truck ever usually.