Time Out

Pause today, if only for a minute. Examine your life, the grand themes that have emerged from it, the minute details of its daily grind. Consider in that minute of reflection what you have, and consider how the best of what you have is only possible in America. Consider the possibilities that lay before you, and consider the freedom to pursue them that is only possible in America. Consider the comfort in which you live, the opportunities to work hard and to reap the fruits of your labor. Consider your freedom, the freedom to have your own thoughts, to share them without fear of reprisal, to pray to whatever God you want, or to no God at all, and the freedom pursue that which makes you happiest.

Consider these things, and cherish them. On today, of all days, remember that however unpopular our opinions, however uncivil our discourse, however jaded and cynical and mean and petty our society chooses to be, we at least have the choice to be so. Ours are the freedoms worth fighting for, and ours is the nation worth dying for.

Today is a day when we honor and remember the dead. We can look back seven short years and be sad, or angry, or fearful. But whose memory do you honor that way? Whose life do you celebrate? Today is a day to look back not seven years, but 232. Every day from then until now, including that day seven years ago, has been a day that the citizens of this great nation have marched steadily forward in the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness. In the face of great odds, in the wake of great heartache, we have endured. Our way of life has endured. Our freedoms have endured.

Today is neither a day to cower in fear nor a day to lust for vengeance. Today is a day to celebrate your life, to celebrate all life, and to cherish the freedoms that make your life possible. Today is a day to remember the words of Abraham Lincoln:

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.

I wish you a happy day, today, tomorrow, and all days hence.