The Gettysburg Address

Dear Readers,

I've been feeling more patriotic lately. Maybe it’s because I’ve been listening to Mitt Romney talk. Or maybe it’s because my wife and I went grocery shopping recently, and our refrigerator is overflowing, and I feel like I don’t quite deserve the bounty that I find in my kitchen cupboard, and I think that I live in such a blessed land. So many other people in other countries, (Ethiopians, for example) people who are harder working than me, are hungry. And here I am, full.

When I was a high school student, I don't think I said the Pledge of Allegiance very much. Maybe I didn’t because it wasn’t very cool to say it out loud. I remember all the students stood up during the Pledge of Allegiance, but some of them didn’t put their hands on their hearts, and very few of them actually said the words out loud. It just wasn’t cool for some reason to say the words out loud.

But I've been substitute teaching lately, and every morning starts with the Pledge of Allegiance, and now that I’m a little older and wiser, I stand up, put my hand on my heart, and say the words out loud, and think about the words I'm reciting, and I feel proud to be an American.

My last post was about cultural and national identity. I think if there's anything that serves to form an American national identity, any defining American speech, it's the Gettysburg Address. I love the Gettysburg address. It's so beautiful and wonderful. It makes me want to somehow work for "a new birth of freedom." I'd like to have it on my blog, and I think by now it's in the public domain, so here it is, copied and pasted from somewhere on the Internet. (Does it really matter where I got it from? The Gettysburg Address belongs to all of us now. Like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address has become public property, available for free for everyone to enjoy.)

If there's any speech that we ought to make schoolchildren memorize, I think it may be this one. Enjoy.

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.