As I take up my pen to write the editorial for this issue, I am daunted by the quality of the articles that are contained here and they challenge me to match their excellence in these opening remarks. I think the reason I felt equal to the task when I was first asked to write the editorial was because I was fresh from my mother's death and in awe of the incredible transition she had made. She announced to us at Christmas time that tests showed that her cancer, in remission for twenty-five years, slow-growing for eight more years, had metastasized to her bones. The next three months until she died were a passage for her and for me. For myself I moved through my own fear of her death to becoming someone who could offer her some help, something she really needed as she passed over. I was able to be a friend to my mother during her death and I am immensely grateful for this. Such is my recent experience with fear.

Fear has this looking glass quality to it sometimes. You approach it with fear and foreboding and if you have the courage and vision to pass through it, you emerge on the other side radiant with knowledge of the divine. But I don't want to trivialize the task. Fear is a signal of something important. Sometimes we don't even get to the point of feeling it. Denial masks it and we feel comfortable; we don't even realize that something important is afoot. Fear sometimes can let us know this....if we allow it in. This issue is filled with the multitude of experiences and insights that people have about fear.

We have three incredible interviews in this issue, some of our best, but before I get to them....

Several of our writers see us as a macho culture, in denial of fear and suffering for it. Harris Brieman, in an article about his work with men in prison, draws a picture of men, both in and outside of prison, trapped in a mold of toughness. Both Barbara DeMille and Nancy Madlin describe this as a cultural problem not just limited to men, but extending to everyone.

A number of our authors say that denial is sitting right on top of fear. We deny things, we don't even want to look at things, because to do so triggers fear. Helen Caldicott, founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility, leader of the nuclear freeze movement, says that the end result can be depression. Helen is a model of courage for us. Her interview is filled with courageous and refreshing insight and she says that her greatest pleasure is helping people to overcome their denial, their fear, and inspiring them to action.

A number of our authors have unpleasant, frightening facts for us to look at and actions for us to take: see John Amidon's article on the School of the Americas, our own editors Frank and Connie Houde's story on their trip to Mexico, Chris Mercogliano's book review of Our Stolen Future. Their challenge is to see what there is to see, feel the fear and do something.

Then we have some of the most incredibly moving accounts of heroism that I have read in my life. Our beautiful interview with the brother and sister-in-law of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, shows a couple in slow motion relationship with each other, step by step in beautiful trust and respect for each other, picking their way through their fears to knowing that Ted Kaczynski was the Unabomber and turning him in. And then there's Anabel Watson's account of the women in Bosnia who founded Through Heart to Peace and have been making a huge difference in an area of horrifying savagery (three of our editors were on the 1997 convoy of international women). Then there are others, Terry Trevor facing her young son's cancer, Arlene Istar Lev as a lesbian parent, facing the fears and prejudices of others in raising her children, and Kenneth Quat's being with his young son's Tourette's Syndrome.

Joseph Jastrab does as good a job as anyone I've seen to draw a different paradigm regarding fear for us to learn from. It's the way out of being boxed in by our fears and the way to growing up. And moving through fear to the other side is described in two beautifully important essays for women. Jeannine Parvati Baker's article on the fear of birth is a window into a great cultural secret. (Yes, women, it is true. Read the article and see what I mean). And then Kim Domenico, like no one I've seen, lays the gauntlet down and says, "All right women, here's the part you play in this patriarchal culture of ours. The way out is through your fears."

This is one power packed, incredible issue. Please take the time to read it all and you will see that I am not exaggerating.

Ellen Bennett Becker