The Brave Men, Living and Dead...

When I was four years old, my mom put me in a private school operated by a cousin of ours because I was apparently driving her a little crazy with my incessant talking and exuberance. (Don't worry, she did like me. Honest. She just had this deeply engrained desire to retain her sanity.)

Anyway, I think one of her methods of coping was to keep me busy, and she was pretty inventive when it came to thinking up interesting things for me to do. One day, she called me over and showed me something in a magazine, suggesting that I memorize it so I could recite it at school. It was the Gettysburg Address, and I decided to do just that...learn it by memory and say it in front of the student body.

Even then, I knew these words were golden:

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.

On this Veteran's Day, may we indeed, as citizens of these United States, resolve that our dead from every war shall not have died in vain. And may government of the people, by the people and for the people never perish from the earth.