A Short Elegy on Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address"

Seven score and three years ago this day (November 19, 1863), President Abraham Lincoln stood on the battleground at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where in less than two minutes; he redefined the meaning of American representative democracy by reminding his listeners that America's moral authority to be the "last, best hope of earth" was derived from the proposition "that all men are created equal."

Once again, we are engaged in a great civil war of ideas, testing whether this nation's great moral principles or its insatiable appetite for material comfort and instant gratification will long endure. On one hand, the United States was and still is the land of opportunity. It is the place where people of the world fled to escape political and religious persecution in their own countries. It is the place where some people still believe a person should be judged by the content of his character, not by the color of his skin or the profession he chooses.

On the other hand, America has increasingly become a place where the reliance on technology alone as the solution to all problems has become the norm. We have become slaves to devices that seek to substitute artifical intelligence for creative thought. Without these mechanical masters to guide us, we are like lost sheep in a snowstorm. When they fail us, as they often do, we can no longer balance our checkbook, shop at the local supermarket, or vote in a fair, democratic, election. We have enabled Big Brother to spy on us, in the name of national security. We think it is all together fitting and proper that big government should do this. But in a larger sense, we have traded away our freedom for tyranny.

Instead of instilling in our children a sense of pride in who they are as free men and women, we implore them to sacrifice unceasingly upon the alters of standardized testing, in order to appease the false gods of math and science, lest they become the child left behind. We will stand in line for hours (even days) at the mall to acquire the latest gadget that in a few months will be obselete. Worse yet, we will lie, cheat, steal from or kill anybody who gets in the way of our "pursuit of happiness." What have we Americans done to ourselves that no foreign nation or despot could have ever done to us?

Abraham Lincoln challenged his listeners to action by telling them they had a choice to make. They could allow "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" to perish from the earth by overturning the proposition or they could rededicate themselves to the democratic principles (equality, justice for all, personal responsibility, free thought, political accountability) upon which the nation was founded--principles that their own loved ones and countless others had fought to preserve. Only then would there be a "new birth of freedom," in which the dead had not died in vain.

We too have a choice to make. Will we rise to Lincoln's challenge? Will we keep technology in its proper place as a useful tool without allowing it to dictate our entire existance? Will we promote the arts and humanities subjects (including history) to give our children a well-rounded, balanced education? How will the world remember what we did here? Will we experience a "new birth of freedom" or will the moral lights continue to go out all around us?

--Bryce O. Stenzel