.Andrea, your rousing heart beats so resound
It’s giving me whiplash…so bad I can like it
Nearly near enough to try seeing the glass half full again
Although it’s only been a quarter full for some time now
There is nothing more deadpan or even mournful
Than the face of an optimist in this ragged 21st C
As the pages keep turning black & blue & red all over
& those with vitriol on their graph paper run the show
.So to say I’d prefer to beam and take to the streets
Like a Rangoon University scholar or a mild monk
Is an understatement as obviously as this cliché, certainly
While I fear the clown with the bastard book & firepower
Would succeed in drowning-out all the good vibes as we all try
To lay it all out there, just as 4 score & 07 years ago, …y’ know?
~~
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.
~~ Abraham Lincoln [FWIW]
http://www.answers.com/topic/gettysburg-address Gettysburg Address
The Gettysburg Address was a brief oration delivered by President Abraham Lincoln on 19 November 1863 during the dedication ceremony of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The entire speech consisted of 272 words and took approximately three minutes to deliver. Its simple eloquence and evocation of transcendent themes are recognized as one of, if not the greatest, speech in American politics. Demonstrating the quintessence of Lincoln's thought concerning the sacred nature of liberty embodied in the democratic experiment, the address is heralded with transforming Northern opinion about the "unfinished work" of war before them and ultimately revolutionizing how Americans understood the nature of the Republic.
