Dedicated to Liberty and Justice for All

The numbers are staggering.  In just three days time 165, 120 Americans engaged in an incredibly bloody battle at Gettysburg.  By the time the cannons were stilled and the gun smoke cleared, 7,058 of them lay dead, 33,264 were wounded, and thousands more were missing in action or captured.  It was, by most accounts, the turning point of the Civil War.  It would lead, in time to the defeat of the Confederacy and the reunification of the United States.  All this happened 150 years ago this week.

Some, though, would argue the war is still being fought.  Some would argue that the core issues--racism, states rights and others--have yet to be resolved.  Certainly, there are no shortage of symbols of the conflict still standing.  Here in Florida, for instance, at the intersection of Interstates 4 & 75, a giant Confederate flag waves atop a very tall pole, visible for a great distance by anyone in the area.

 

Later, after the battle was over, Abraham Lincoln offered his most enduring speech at the dedication ceremony held to mark the cemetery where many of those killed in that battle were interred.  It was a short speech.  A speech much maligned in its day by the press.  He had, after all, written it on the back of an envelope!  But it struck a chord.  And it continues to remind us of the responsibility we all share to see to it that our nation lives up to the ideal set forth in the Constitution.  For this nation, he said, was "conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men [no doubt today he would say all people] are created equal."  That is the ideal. And living up to it is still a challenge.  He called it "a great task."  And so it is. 

 

On this Independence Day, this Fourth of July, might we all reflect on how we are advancing the cause of freedom.  Might we all reflect on how we are promoting liberty and justice for all.  Lincoln said we should dedicate ourselves to the cause.  Might we all do so, even as we remember the dead at Gettyburg, and all those other places in times of war and times of peace, where others have given so much.