So a while back I posted a thread on Immigration in the General Discussion forum, and rather than revive the debate there, I decided to put this here instead.
This weekend, despite the loss of an old friend in an accident, I made good on a promise to take my wife and son to the Abraham Lincoln Museum in Springfield IL. I'm glad I did.
It was a rather interesting, and sobering trip back in time. Honest Abe was a hell of a man, and overcame a lot of adversity in his life.
One thing that struck me as I was working my way through the exhibits was the handbills from when he was running for election. There, from a time that nearly tore our nation in two, were Abe's words in Spanish, German, and French.
I got to thinking about this, and about the complaints many of us, including me, make about having road signs and such in Spanish. I mean, this is America right, shouldn't we all speak English?
Yet here was a man, who I dare say was one of the greatest Americans to ever live, who embraced his fellow citizens, no matter what language they spoke. There was no "political correctness" in his time, yet he saw fit to have his platform printed in the native language of the new citizens in the area so that they too could understand what he stood for.
If Abraham Lincoln could embrace the differences in the local people, who am I to say he was wrong? Abraham Lincoln was the son of a pioneer, one of those Americans who ventured into the "wilderness" and opened the way for those who would come after.
A self made man if ever there was one, he pulled himself up from the hard scrabble life of the frontier to become the President of the United States, and to lead the struggle to preserve the Union.
As I stood looking at the photographs of the battlefield at Gettysburg, littered with the bodies of those men who died to preserve the Union, my eyes were drawn to the inscription along the top of one wall of the room, a copy, in Lincoln's own hand, of the Gettysburg Address.
"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate...we can not consecrate...we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this 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."
It was the first line that got me-"...and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."
"...that all men are created equal."
Lincoln was a firm believer in that statement. Here he stated it plain and clear. All men, no matter where they are from, or what language they speak, or the color of their skin. ALL MEN...
How many men, and women, who never learned to speak "proper" English, have shed their blood, not only on the battlefields of the Civil War, but on battle fields all over the world, to support this American ideal...that all men are created equal?
How many have sacrificed their lives so that I might have the freedom to gripe and bitch about "foreigners" taking over 'my' country? And how many of them were born here, how many weren't. Those men traveled to this country, swore an oath to uphold it's ideals, and DIED to protect them.
It was a humbling look at myself, and I hope that I came away from it with a new understanding of my fellow Americans, no matter what language they speak, no matter where they were born. We are, after all, a nation of "foreigners".
)))
