We can long endure.

Gettysburg National Cemetery. (Author Photo)

Fear has not helped me find my way very often. I have gotten lost in the woods and I have panicked. I did not know where I was let alone how I would get to where I was going.

When I panic, I cannot find solutions. When I am really, totally overwhelmed, I just want to shut down. That is an extreme form of panic for me, but it has happened to me more times than I think I care to recall.

I am also temperamentally allergic to problems without solutions. A problem without a solution would give me hives.

However, I have learned through bitter experience to wait. Then, after a pause to get control of my fears, that is when I begin to search for ways out of a fix. Then I am not quite as scared that I am in a fix as I was when I began, and I can concentrate on finding a way or ways out of it.

Once I get control of my emotions, I can do more than simply react. I can "proact," meaning be proactive. I can find ways of dealing with a situation that has caused me panic at the moment; often those ways make the situation better than it was before the problem that caused me anxiety. But I cannot be proactive while I am consumed by fear of what has happened and what still might happen, and I have yet to see anyone who can.

This is my experience as an individual. I'll bet that it is similar to yours.

The national experience has not yet been seen. But so far as I can see it, the foundation remains the same both for the individual and for the nation: the belief that good will happen yet.

It takes time for the fear to pass. This has been my own experience surrounding traumatic events in my life. Sometimes it takes an hour. Sometimes more. But the fear passes, or more accurately, the control that fear has over me passes. After so many times when I have experienced panic passing away, I have come to believe that it will.

Whether the nation will share this belief will depend on the nation's experience. National experience, over time, and on many occasions. Eight score and two years ago, President Lincoln described "a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

Now as then, I think it is important to recognize that we are in a great civil war, "testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure."

Today is a fitting day to begin to answer that question and meet that test. Today is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. The Day started out as a holiday to remember Dr. King's birthday, as I recall. Somewhere along the line, I do not know when exactly, Dr. King's Day also became a "National Day of Service." It seems appropriate to rededicate ourselves to the propositions that leaders like President Lincoln and Dr. King stood for.

Today is a good day, then, to begin to answer the question of whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.