Friday, July 04, 2008

Happy 4th of July

To my fellow Americans. Happy Birthday. On this day all those years ago, our Founding Fathers set forth to create this great nation in which we live today. These past 30 years have brought great change to this nation both good and bad. I worry for us as a people and see a coming of a great divide in the near future. There is a cancer deep in the heart of America and it needs to be dealt with...

On this date over 145 years ago the Union Army awoke on the fields of Gettysburg to find the Army of Northern Virginia had pulled out during the night. After three days of horrific battle, both armies lay broken, almost 50,000 Americans lay dead or wounded on the field. Lee withdrew his troops and headed back to Virginia for what was considered the beginning of the end of the Civil War.

Four months later President Lincoln was invited to speak at the dedication of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg. He said the following, read and remember and see how what he said all those years ago still hold meaning today.....

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.

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