Laura Erickson's For the Birds

This little planet is so sad sometimes, and now we have to face a week of endless stories about last September’s horrors, trivializing much of it, beginning and ending with commercial messages to buy this product or vote for this candidate because hey–they care about September 11, too.

When I was asked to relate today’s program to last year’s tragedy, I was stymied. Birds usually bring me comfort in the face of sorrow, but this year, considering West Nile Virus and a host of other problems, I’m as worried about birds as I am about us. And what could I possibly say that could bring anyone any greater understanding, or comfort, on this September 11? Is there anything worthwhile that anyone can say to mark this occasion?

But just wondering this brought to mind the words of a Republican president who led the nation during another horrifying crisis. This other Republican’s simple speech, resounding with faith in liberty and fundamental rights-seems more appropriate today than any little bird story that I could come up with. Some commentators have been using the Gettysburg Address as a call to make a preemptive strike against Iraq, as if Saddam Hussein had piloted the planes a year ago, or protected Al Quada. But as many times as I’ve run Lincoln’s words through my head, I simply cannot hear him justifying a war against Iraq by virtue of the blood spilled on September 11. Judge for yourself. Abraham Lincoln spoke these words on November 19, 1863:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon 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 here on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it 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 can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they have, thus far, so nobly carried on. 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 here gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom; and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.