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But there is wisdom to guide us...
The day after our deeply divided United States of America held a strongly contested national election, Philip Palin, one of the several skilled writers at
Homeland Security Watch, reminds us we have faced periods of much deeper division, harsher challenges, and deadlier threats, during which perhaps the finest President in the history
of the Republic sought to bind our wounds and prepare for the work ahead.
Philip quotes from the Second Inaugural Address of Abraham
Lincoln and several commentaries on it. His post is worth reading in its entirety, but
here is a taste of what Presidents used to be like:
“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
Now there was a President far better than any we’ve had in quite
some time. Last night none of us got everything we wanted, but we all may have received more than our efforts warrant.
I disagree with the idea Lincoln was a great President. He was an average one who oversaw the death of the first U.S. republic. The one he led in, the second republic, is now dying before our eyes but not in the dramatic manner the first one did. It is going out with a whimper. Unlike the French, we do not need to throw out a constitution each time we move from one epoch to the next because ours is a "living Constitution" that allows us to make it up as we go along. And where we do we go next? Look to Honduras as an example where we are to go next.
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