Maybe it’s just me, but it is frustrating when I hear someone say Happy Memorial Day. There is nothing at all happy about this day. When the heroes who served in our Armed Forces sign on the dotted line to “defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” they do not sign in ink. They sign with their lives. On Memorial Day, we remember those who gave the full measure of their lives to save ours.
There’ve been numerous speeches commemorating this day or other historic battles. Perhaps none have been as profound as President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Lincoln believed this speech was an abject failure. In reality, it was one of the most poignant in history. The text is below. God bless those who made the ultimate sacrifice.
"Fourscore 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 battlefield 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 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 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."
In liberty,
Brett
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