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 (Lincoln, 1863).Just shy of the 200th year anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth, "we the people" will experience "A New Birth of Freedom" as President-elect Barack Obama is sworn in as the 44th president of the United States of America, and I will be in attendance. No matter how small of a spec I will make in a crowd of millions, there is no place I'd rather be than in the presence of history. In the place that commerorates the life and works of our 16th president, Abraham Lincoln, the place where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 100 years after Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, shared his "Dream" with my grandparents and great-grandparents in 1963. Yes, I will be there when Barack Obama looks across the National Mall towards the Lincoln Memorial and addresses the nation for the first time as president, letting freedom ring from the White house to the "snowcapped Rockies of Colorado...the curvaceous slopes of California...the Stone Mountain of Georgia...the Lookout Mountain of Tennessee...every hill and molehill of Mississippi...every mountainside...Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"
Also check my post Is Racism Dead from Novemeber 5th.
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