KEEP THE FAITH!

FLAG OF OF OUR FATHERS

Wednesday, 8:30 AM.  43 degrees F, wind SW, moderate with stronger gusts.  A high overcast enshroudes the sky.  The humidity is down to 53% and the barometer is trending down, currently 29.98".  It is another dull, sunless morning, and although warm enough it is overall a rather dreary day.

   I am certain I am not alone in my frustration with the spiteful shallowness of much of what goes on in politics today, and the news media's reporting of it is petulant and shallow as well.   Humor, admittedly often equally  shallow and misguided, is the only way I can deal with much of the reality of today.  When that isn't appropriate or enough, I might turn to satire or even what I perceive as justifiable anger.  Much of the time I feel like I have reverted to the 1960's, a time of social and economic chaos that we were all glad to consign to the history books.  Perhaps such times are unavoidable, even necessary, in the uneven advancement of human progress.
   Two historical events of this week, only days apart on the calendar but one hundred years apart in history, are Lincoln's Gettysburg Address (Nov. 19, 1863), and the assassination of John F. Kennedy (Nov. 22, 1963).  No matter how bad the current situation is, it pales in comparison with either of those awful historic times, and neither humor, nor satire nor anger is appropriate in their commemoration.  The nation survived the 1860's and the 1960's.  It will  survive its present travails.  Keep the faith! 

 LINCOLN'S 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, 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.

-- Abraham Lincoln

Nov. 19, 1863