7 A final word

This past weekend we celebrated the 234th birthday of our country. As with most if not all of you, I am profoundly grateful to be an American.

As a young man I lived for two years in Brazil. I have returned three times to visit and have traveled all over that vast country that represents half the continent of South America. I have a great love and appreciation for its citizens. Kay just returned from his second two-year stint in Peru. He and Karen have undoubtedly left their hearts with the humble people of that Andean country. Others of you, similarly, have lived in other lands and climes. You likewise have yearnings for those nations and peoples.

And yet, none of these places compares to the United States of America, a land unique in all the history of the world for its commitment to and defense of freedom and justice and liberty. We have come to it in starts and fits, to be sure, since that sweltering summer day in Philadelphia in July 1776 when Thomas Jefferson penned those immortal words: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

But it has been a consistent ideal we have struggled toward through the years, now approaching two and a half centuries, as we finally gave citizenship to the slaves, as we extended suffrage to women, as we struggled through two world wars and other conflicts, some yet raging, to extend the blessings of liberty to all the world, and as we finally stopped seeing the slant of a person's eyes or the color of his skin.

Abraham Lincoln, who as our 16th president presided over the nation during what was perhaps its most perilous hour, spoke of America as a city set upon a hill and as the last best hope of earth. He said, in words with which all of us should be familiar:

"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 battlefield 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 cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot 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" (Gettysburg Address, Nov. 19, 1863).

May that be our resolve as Americans in the 21st century, that all who have served and died in the cause of freedom, who gave the last full measure of their devotion, shall not have done so in vain and that this nation, under God, shall not perish from the earth.