"Four score and seven years ago..."
Nov. 19th, 2007 04:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thatcrazycajunOne of the best-known speeches in history was given on this date in 1863 at Gettysburg, PA by the late former US President, Abraham Lincoln (R). It exemplifies the advice on public speaking given decades later by his successor, Franklin Roosevelt: "Be sincere, be brief, be seated." It is also the finest memorial to the sacrifices made by our or any country's men and women in uniform I have ever encountered.
The Great Emancipator's speech, reportedly composed on the back of an envelope on a train en route to the site, contains the phrase, "The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here; but it can never forget what they did here." About the soldiers he had come to help honor, he was quite right in the latter; but in the former, his becoming modesty made him more wrong than he could possibly have imagined...as anyone who's been to his memorial in Washington, DC and seen those supposedly insignificant words carved into its marble walls, there to stand for the ages, can attest.
Let us all pray that once more, "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."
The Great Emancipator's speech, reportedly composed on the back of an envelope on a train en route to the site, contains the phrase, "The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here; but it can never forget what they did here." About the soldiers he had come to help honor, he was quite right in the latter; but in the former, his becoming modesty made him more wrong than he could possibly have imagined...as anyone who's been to his memorial in Washington, DC and seen those supposedly insignificant words carved into its marble walls, there to stand for the ages, can attest.
Let us all pray that once more, "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."
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Date: 2007-11-19 09:52 pm (UTC)But if you replace "pray" and "Under $deity" with "work our tails off towards the most laudable goal of", I'm with you 110%. Goodness knows the current incarnation of freedom is on life support... we could use a new one.
(I remember the story of the events surrounding the address... Lincoln dashed it off on the back of an envelope on the train coming in... and when the guy who was supposed to be the main event finished speaking - and he'd droned on for over an hour - he got opera claps, whereas when Lincoln sat down, the ovation lasted longer than the speech. So goeth legend.)