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November 11, 2006

Veteran's Day

On the eleventh day of the eleventh month at the eleventh hour, the guns fell silent on the western front, and the first 'War to end all Wars' came to an end. (Or, more precisely, went to halftime.) Today I will wander the hills of a battlefield of another war, the largest ever fought in the Americas, where two great armies clashed for three days in 1863 to determine whether or not a government dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal could survive. Months after the battle, President Lincoln came to the site and delivered what is probably his most famous speech, the Gettysburg Address.

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.

Happy Veteran's Day to you all. I will have pictures and more up this evening.