A Gettysburg Address for 2021

Reminded by Heather Cox Richardson’s Letter from an American this morning that yesterday was the 158th anniversary of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and considering the deepening threat to the nation posed by those who seek to replace, even with violence, the Republic with an authoritarian regime, I decided to try my hand at modifying Lincoln’s words to apply to our current civil war.

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Twelve score and five years ago, our fathers and mothers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in the ideal—though not the practice—of liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in another frightening civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met in the early 2020s on many battlefields of that war.

We must rededicate ourselves to the great task before us and make increased devotion to the cause of making real the ideals—freedom, democracy, equality, fairness, opportunity, religious liberty, welcoming the world’s poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free—enunciated when our nation was founded, goals to which so many—soldiers, abolitionists, protesters, women’s rights activists, labor organizers, civil rights workers, and more—devoted their lives, that we now highly resolve that their efforts and sacrifices were not in vain; that the nation 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.