Be Like Abe

"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."
                                                         --President Abraham Lincoln, March 4, 1865

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In his second inaugural address, delivered just five weeks before his assassination in 1865, Abraham Lincoln held out an olive branch to a nation divided and convulsed by war.  Aware that the end of the conflict was near, Lincoln understood that the work ahead involved redemption rather than retribution and healing rather than hatred.

It's not hard to imagine what Lincoln would have thought about the years that followed--the sad collapse of reconstruction, the rise of hate groups, the passage of laws creating two separate but unequal Americas, and the brutal violence accompanying the civil rights movement of the 1950's and 60's.  And you can easily hear his disappointment and dismay at recent events in America, many of which suggest we've a long way to go before achieving a "just and lasting peace among ourselves."

One hundred and fifty years ago this week, America buried Lincoln, a President for the ages, maybe the best we've known.  Following his assassination on April 14, 1865, Lincoln's body was carried by train from Washington DC to Springfield, Illinois, passing along the way through Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland, Indianapolis, and Chicago. The funeral procession took a few weeks, with thousands turning out to pay their respects.

Given the racial strife that's sometimes as toxic today as a century and a half ago, it's on all of us to realize that creating a fair and respectful society is everybody's business. Righting wrongs and putting the past to rest isn't just the government's job or schools' job or some other generation's job, but yours and mine as well.  

I know everyone's busy right now, with the semester winding down and summer ahead, but sometime this week, remember Abe Lincoln--someone who put it all on the line for America.  

We could all stand to take a page from Lincoln's life and try, now and then at least, to be a bit like Abe.