It looks like the time has come to sing Auld Lang Syne
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at the time of their first great victory, over a hundred fifty years ago: over my lifetime, madmen came to inherit and destroy something they themselves never labored to build
Lincoln remains somewhere between a lost friend and the older brother we never actually knew: a towering figure who showed us how to ford an icy stream in winter -- while half the onlookers jeered that he was a reckless radical, and the rest sneered that he was too slow and lacked courage. This ability, to move forward as needed, despite making almost everyone unhappy, for varying and different reasons, is actually a quite admirable sign of political genius -- and that genius marked the early days of the GOP
His era, now, is an old-long-since that no one living today can remember, but he raised the cup of kindness: Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God (he said) and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered -- and later: 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
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