147 Years Ago

Update: I apologize for the weird formatting...

                                                You can kick the asses of some of the bears

 all of the time, and all of the bears some of the time...

So, about 147 years ago, Abraham Lincoln gave a little speech in a little town.

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.


It's so brief, isn't it.  Some of the sentence are so plain and unadorned.  "We are met on a great battlefield of that war."  How simple is that writing?  And how clear?

America produced two remarkable men in those cataclysmic years.  Both were born into the worst possible deprivation.  Both effectively taught themselves to read.  Both become extraordinary writers and thinkers, rising above the expectations of others and perhaps even themselves.

The other man was Frederick Douglass.  Here's a few things written by Mr. Douglass :


Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.

A little learning, indeed, may be a dangerous thing, but the want of learning is a calamity to any people. 

It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.

In thinking of America, I sometimes find myself admiring her bright blue sky-her grand old woods-her fertile fields-her beautiful rivers-her mighty lakes and star-crowned mountains. But my rapture is soon checked when I remember that all is cursed with the infernal spirit of slave-holding and wrong; When I remember that with the waters of her noblest rivers, the tears of my brethren are borne to the ocean, disregarded and forgotten; That her most fertile fields drink daily of the warm blood of my outraged sisters, I am filled with unutterable loathing.

We are about to enter the Sesquicentennial years of the Civil War.  Similarly we will observe many of the 50 year anniversaries of the monumental moments of the civil rights movement.

We do this at a time of fractious civil discord.  Obama rose to national prominence with his electrifying address to the 2004 Democratic national convention in which he decried the separating of America into "Red' and "Blue" Americas.  And he has endeavored to try and maintain efforts at bipartisanship.  He added inefficient tax cuts to the stimulus bill, he tried incessantly to bend the HCR bill to appeal to the Senators from Maine, he did the same with financial reform.  He recently offered to meet the GOP leadership to discuss the next two years.  They were too busy.

Before the Civil War started, Lincoln - a man Obama clearly wishes to emulate - said the following to the seceding South at the conclusion of his first inaugural address:

In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to "preserve, protect, and defend it."

34

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. Now we have the governor of Texas is talking about seceding from Medicare and the new Health Care Reform. We have an Alaskan snowbilly grifter who could possibly ascend to the nomination of the GOP in two years.  We have a major party in Congress who have openly stated that their job is to "insure that Obama is a one term president". In effect, the GOP has seceded from governance.  They exist now, almost entirely as a party in love with power as opposed to governing.  The similarity is clearest to the PRI of Mexico that existed not to serve any policy goals, but simply to maintain the status quo and stability.  The GOP wants no forward change, only to return to the same policies that screwed over the economy, the military and our place in the world. Several critics have referred to the modern GOP as the Confederate Party.  Indeed it is overwhelmingly, white, older, Southern and rural. As we ponder the significance and remember the legacy of the Civil War and its final chapter written in the streets of Birmingham and Selma fifty years ago, it's worth remembering who seceded and why.  It's worth remembering that democracy requires cooperation and a common purpose.