I'm still awake from yesterday. The reality of what we have done is slowly sinking in all around us. We have entered a new land. A new era. Our Hopes were not after all in vain.
The most common feeling at least amongst us old timers is the Moon Landing. Remember how that was?
Well this is the landing on the Sea of Tranquility, the March on Washington, Woodstock, the Emancipation proclamation, Stonewall, the invention of pizza, and the opening of Disneyland all rolled into one.
My view is that the American Civil War has finally ended.
Now comes the time to truly bind up the nation's wounds.
Lincoln had some things to say about times like these.
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.
4 comments:
Dear Uncle,
It was great to see people gather together and dance in the streets. Living history!
Get some sleep when you are able, in the meantime eat and be happy.
XO, P & RP
Yes this is truly a new era. Bless you, and the good reverend for all for kindness's to me.
In 1968 I met Robert Kennedy just after the Indiana primary and just a couple weeks before he was murdered. I listened to him speak. I shook his hand. I was thrilled by him and then...I was shaken when he was killed.
In January of this year I heard Barack Obama give a full speech for the first time. Kennedy, I thought... This is how I felt when I saw Kennedy, I thought.
I had friends in Chicago at the Grant Park victory celebration Tuesday night. They were in a VIP section about 25 feet from the podium and emailed me about 40 pictures. That was nice, but I wish I could have been there. To have been able to go back to 1986, the way it should have been.
Feeling mellow.
Hi fanofgrendel!,
Welcome to these pages. Hope ya likes'em.
Yeah those of us that were around, and active in the late 1960's have a unique view of these current amazing events.
As I said it seems our hopes were not in vain. We at long last have left the wilderness.
Now comes the hard part.
The building of a new kind of World.
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