270 Words

On this, the 150th Anniversary of the Gettysburg address we remember those husbands and sons who did not die in vain.  My grandfather tells me about his grandfather, who fought and returned home intact, at least physically intact, from that war.  We easily forget with our Facebook updates and Obamacare failures but these words remind us of the carnage that took place during those years and the relative magnanimity that followed the south's defeat, magnanimity born of the knowledge that we were all still, or rather again, one nation.  When we have difficulty giving grace to our political opponents who do no more than insult our own narrow conception of good sense, we demonstrate our own ignorance, shortsightedness, and vainglorious pride.

You don't have to say much to mean much.  It doesn't take much to forgive much.  Everything hinges on remembering, despite our differences, we are all Americans and "jaw, jaw is better than war, war."

 

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.