Eleven score and eleven years ago

"our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

One hundred forty-four years ago (Nov. 19, 1863) President Abraham Lincoln spoke at a ceremony dedicating a battlefield which claimed more American casualties than any battlefield ever had - or likely ever will.

As this anniversary approached, I couldn't help thinking that many of the issues President Lincoln spoke of are with us today. We are not at war among ourselves with weapons, but one could argue that we are indeed at war with ourselves.

Mr. Lincoln continued:

"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 battlefield of that war. We are met to dedicate a portion of it as the final resting place of 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 cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot 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 that they have have thus far so nobly carried on.

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 here gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Let it be.

Don Wheeler