None of Us Got Everything We Wanted

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.