Americans are filled this year with commemorations of seminal events in our nation’s history.
We’ve noted already the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, with its climactic speech by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who proclaimed for the ages that “I have a dream today …” This Friday marks the 50th year since a gunman shot down the 35th president of the United States, John F. Kennedy, as he motored through downtown Dallas.
Today also marks the 150th year since another milestone moment. President Abraham Lincoln stood on a field that once was the scene of immense carnage and delivered the Gettysburg Address.
The speech is remarkable for two things: One is the content of the text and the profound wisdom it contains. The other is its brevity. Here is the speech … in its entirety:
“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 battle-field 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.”
President Lincoln was incorrect about one element of his remarks. He declared “The world will little notice, nor long remember what we say here … ”
Wrong, Mr. President. The world remembers.
And many of wish we could return to an era when statesmen rose to speak such wisdom.