In 1863 Abraham Lincoln rode six hours by railroad, stagecoach and horseback to speak for two minutes at Gettysburg. Professor Edward Everett, not President Lincoln, was the battlefield dedication’s featured speaker. Yet Lincoln’s speech, not Everett’s has stature in our heritage. “I wish that I could flatter myself that I had come as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes,” Everett wrote Lincoln later. The Civil War, he’d said, tested whether a nation “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” can long endure.
Lincoln’s theme framed my career in government and education. It frames my writing now.
Our democracy, though fragile, is resilient. It passed through a Civil War that cost us Lincoln’s life and did not truly end though Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox while Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and 13th Amendment freed the enslaved. That democracy emerged from the Depression and World Wars. Yet our complacent nation needs frequent upheavals — civil rights, feminist, LGBTQ, immigrant, working class, antiwar, antiracist — to shatter illusions and bring near our ideals. Dissent is unpatriotic, some say, but it in fact comes from love.
The Southern Poverty Law Center found 1728 Confederate memorials in and beyond that region to preserve the “Grand Lost Cause” mythology that drapes benign terms like “heritage” or “states’ rights” across Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens’ Cornerstone Speech text: the 1861 secession, he said, rests “on the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man,that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.” That seems still widely believed with Stephens himself forgotten.
I’ve lived 67 years with 36 married, 29 a parent, 12 in therapy to learn what I have about life.
I’ve seen South Korea and the Philippines, Ireland and Nicaragua, the latter to research the Sandinista’s UNESCO Award-winning literacy campaign, an achievement that even the Reagan State Department confirmed for me. This, after the Sandinista revolution toppled Anastasio Somoza, a U.S. backed dictator, tragically so, typical for the time — as is, in our time, the revisionist history that asserts Senator Bernie Sanders was wrong then to praise them.
I’ve gone house to house, here, to craft strategies for healing in places where hate crimes occurred and built coalitions in Howard Beach and Crown Heights to elicit a vision, forge a consensus, then shape the planning for positive change. Amtrak, Greyhound, planes and our family car transport me with ease beyond Lincoln’s dreams but his ideals have always been with me. “It’s so small!” I cried when Cornell University Professor Sam Beck and I moved from large jet to four-seat prop plane to guide workshops at a Rocky Mount, North Carolina race conference in 1996. “The smaller the plane, the more dedicated we are,” Sam shot back as we slid into clouds.
Three Greyhound days from Manhattan’s chaotic Port Authority Bus Terminal to placid South Dakota to serve George McGovern’s 1980 Senate campaign exposed me to the New Right’s political assault on our Midwest heartland. It acquainted me with farming’s land-based faith in renewal, and the region’s progressive traditions. Immersing myself as a boy in my Dad’s vast book collection meant I’d read forever but I vowed that experiences would best teach and test me, help me grow.
“Life is not a spectator sport, If you’re going to spend your whole life in the grandstand just watching what goes on, in my opinion you’re wasting your time,” urged Jackie Robinson — the nation’s first black corporate executive, lead movie actor and founder of the nation’s first African-American owned and operated financial institution (Harlem’s Freedom National Bank) — after crossing big-time baseball’s color line, his personal dignity and stellar play transcending internal Dodger resistance and external death threats.
Ordinary people’s extraordinary deeds have preserved our democracy. It rests in our hands as we prepare for a vital November election. Lincoln inherited the nation’s democratic ideals from the Founders, to him a “sacred trust to preserve, protect and pass on” to the future, to my generation and yours. My body tires sooner these days. Boey, our rescue dog, and I jog for an hour each day to stay fit. Calisthenics and a long midday walk keep me physically strong. My mind is knife-sharp.
What insights emerge as you reflect on my words? What you assume of my views before looking within at my published pieces is, I’m sure, on target. I trust you’ll find them worthwhile but freely dispute them as needed. I hope you’ll debate or discuss and then brainstorm with me. How can we uphold our ideals in hard times? What will enhance our democracy, to pass on the gift Lincoln preserved?
Please reach back in detail at the end. I’ll gladly respond if you do.
Oh, and Unity Forum was the title Sharon forged with me for the two-year “weekly dialogue on racial and ethnic relations” I produced and hosted on WFUV-FM for eighty editions through two years in the Eighties.
Thanks for reading!
