My all-time favorite speech, aside from the Sermon on the Mount by Jesus and Paul’s address on Mars Hill in Acts, is Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
I admire it for the way Lincoln was able to explain something as complicated as the Civil War — how many lengthy tomes have been and continue to be written about every detail of that conflict? — in a few short words. There’s much to be said for an economy of expression.
I’ve always wanted to commit the whole text to memory; I haven’t gotten there yet, but I do know by heart the first two sentences: “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.”
Why would anyone need to write a book about the meaning of the Civil War after Lincoln had already said it all? This nation was established on the basis of liberty and equality; the civil war tested whether that idea would really work.
Thankfully, we passed the test.
As we celebrate Independence Day, remembering those forefathers who had the vision to establish this country, the troubling question arises in the souls of thoughtful, freedom-loving Americans of whether we could still pass a hard examination like that today. We’re squeezed by an aging workforce, by technology that enslaves us, by family units destroyed by moral failings, by threats from abroad and political foolishness on cable TV that is full of sound and fury but signifies nothing.
Despite all of that, I still believe that American freedom will triumph. For 243 years its founding ideal — that freedom is the best and most effective way for mankind to live — has defeated every challenger: slavery, economic depressions, fascism, communism.
I believe freedom will triumph again over its two biggest modern threats: internal strife and an outside threat from China.
First, China has built itself into an economic power by selling goods to Americans while simultaneously stealing our entrepreneur’s best ideas. Now it has a huge economy, powerful military and owns a truckload of American debt. Sounds bad for us.
Yet China is decidely not founded on the principle of individual freedom. The state controls everything there, and anyone who fights the system is crushed (sometimes literally, as in a tank runs over you, like at the Tiananmen Square massacre of democratic protestors 30 years ago). China does not value its own people as individuals; they only matter as far as what they can contribute to the whole.
That will catch up with their economy and government eventually. Free people do better than state control in the long run every time. America has proven that. We just need to stay the course.
Which brings me to my second point: We suffer from terrible in-fighting among two clashing world views that has divided America into blue states and red states, instead of 50 united states. Brings to mind the Mason-Dixon Line before the Civil War.
In this case, both sides want to run from freedom. The left, as many of the Democratic presidential candidates plainly state, wants to end free enterprise and replace it with socialism. The right wants to ball up like an armadillo and stifle free trade in hopes that will cure our economic threats from countries like China. Neither approach will work.
Rather, we need to remember on this Independence Day Lincoln’s admonition: “It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us ... that this nation, under God, 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.”
Charlie Smith is editor and publisher of The Columbian-Progress. Reach him at 736-2611.
