Missing Martin:

As each celebration of his birth goes by, I miss Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr more. And not so much for his achievements in advancing human rights--towering as they are, or his soaring oratory--inspiring as it remains to this day, but more for the example of his steadfastness in the face of fear.

Having lived with the Twentieth Century's burden of frightfulness--nuclear annihilation, wars without number, vast and rapid change, and the newer insecurities of the Twenty-First, terror, poisons and pandemics--I think of Martin often. In a 1985 article in The Other Side, Chuck Fager wrote, "King was as free of fear as the rest of us were gripped by it." And as the tragedy of 1968 showed, he had better cause than any to tremble. King's achievement was to show us the proper response--to let fall the fear that is the burden of all, in order to keep reaching out for the freedom that is the birthright of all. So that we might persevere until a time when, as he says in Letter from a Birmingham Jail, "the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities."