There is no doubt that a lot of people have been trying to destroy this country and it’s potential as described aspirationally in the Declaration of Independence for quite some time now. Some started the process unintentionally because, frankly, they didn’t know any better. Now we have people who understand exactly what they are doing trying to sell the lie that one administration or politician can be responsible for what many of us have done to ourselves or allowed to be done to others.
When I was a student in a little rural mountain school district in another state we memorized the Gettysburg Address. Then our teachers helped us analyze and discuss it, what it meant in its time and what it could mean to us in ours. I’m guessing thats not the way North Carolina Public Schools do it.
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.
