No surprise to anyone paying attention to the visual and verbal cues in the impeachment hearings, we are a divided nation.
Today’s Writer’s Almanac, a daily entry in my email, brought a word gift, The Gettysburg Address by President Abraham Lincoln. It’s been a long time since I read Lincoln’s words.
Consider where we are in our history and juxtapose it against these lines from Lincoln’s address to a divided, confused, hurting nation.
“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
Conceived how?
“in Liberty.”
Dedicated to?
“…the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Why would Lincoln urge us to remember the sacrifices of those who founded and died for this novel notion of a nation and for those from both sides of the Civil War, who’d died at Gettysburg and elsewhere?
“…So they won’t have died in vain. So this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government OF the people, BY the people, and FOR the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
History reminds us We’re perishable.
Vulnerable.
When I listened to Lt. Colonel Vindman, son of immigrants, testify today, I took courage from his opening statement and why he was willing to risk testifying. He told his Dad, who’d once served in the Russian military, “As an American, I don’t have to be afraid to tell the truth.”
When asked “Why?”, Vindman replied, “Because here right matters.”
Here
right
matters.
Lt. Colonel Vindman wasn’t talking about right as in left or right of center.
But
right
as in
true
honorable
and just.
“So that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
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