Memorial Day 2024: Our Duties and Responsibilities

https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/05/25/opinion-memorial-day-the-gettysburg-address-and-the-november-2024-election/

Gettysburg Address offers special significance for Memorial Day

In this fateful election year, Abraham Lincoln’s words of courage and compassion can transcend political divisions

By HASAN ZILLUR RAHIM

May 26, 2024

On Memorial Day, we remember our fallen soldiers.

For several years I have visited California’s oldest secular cemetery, the Oak Hill Memorial Park in San Jose, every Memorial Day to silently express my gratitude to those who sacrificed their lives so we can bask in the sunshine of freedom and democracy.

Veterans and politicians make moving speeches and observe a minute of silence on this hallowed day as the U.S. flag flutters in the breeze, rustling the surrounding sycamore trees. Doves are released as symbols of unity and peace. Small flags line rows and rows of headstones of 14,000 veterans with names that connect the living to the dead: Joseph Milligan of Tennessee (World War I), Charles Harding of Colorado (World War II), Andrew Montello of California (Korea), and on and on.

This year, I will do something different. I will carry a copy of the address President Abraham Lincoln delivered at Gettysburg, Penn., on Nov. 19, 1863, and read it as I walk alongside the graves at Oak Hill. More than 160 years later, Lincoln’s timeless words speak to us with an urgency we must heed.

In particular, two topics demand our attention in this fateful election year. First, as much as we would like our democracy to be strong, it is, in reality, a fragile entity, as the Jan. 6 insurrection showed. Unless we are vigilant about safeguarding it, democracy can succumb to autocracy. Second, the most powerful tool to ensure the flourishing of democracy is to exercise our sacred right to vote. Ignoring or neglecting this right can open the gate to tyranny. Complacency is the enemy of democracy and good governance.

As Lincoln saw it, the Civil War tested the very survival of the nation “conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Slavery, the antithesis of equality, was the evil of his time, and until it was eliminated, even at the horrific cost of a North-South war, Lincoln knew America would not endure.

We may not have slavery today, but the challenges are as daunting. Despite making modest progress in race relations since Lincoln’s time, the undercurrent of racism in many facets of our lives continues to undermine America. And political division over issues such as reproductive freedom, affordable health care, an unfair tax code, gun violence, volatile borders and climate change also threaten the integrity of the Constitution and the survival of our nation.

I request my fellow Americans on this Memorial Day to conscientiously read the Gettysburg Address. It comprises just 272 words and took Lincoln only two minutes to deliver to the gathering of 15,000, yet it has the power to evoke the noble and the transcendent in each of us, a nation of almost 335 million.

The courage, compassion and vision inherent in the Gettysburg Address should persuade us not to think North or South, Blue or Red, coastal or inland, or working class or elite when we vote in the November election but instead, to think America.

As in Lincoln’s time, “the great task remaining before us” today is keeping our nation whole. We can do it by resolving that those who “gave the last full measure of devotion … shall not have died in vain.”

So while we enjoy the biryani and the barbecue on this Memorial Day, let us set aside some time to reflect on the Gettysburg Address so we can dedicate ourselves to the “unfinished work” that our fallen soldiers and veterans “have thus far so nobly advanced.”

Lincoln concluded his address with the hope that democracy “shall not perish from the earth.” While that remains our goal too, we must first ensure with our votes in November that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish” from these United States.

Hasan Zillur Rahim is a mathematics professor at San Jose City College.

 

Gettysburg Address’ Stirring Call Still Relevant, 156 Years Later

You can also read the article here in the San Jose Mercury News

One hundred and fifty-six years ago today, on Nov. 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln delivered an address at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pa., that is as stirring a call for reflection and action in the 21st-century United States as it was in the 19th. Using a mere 272 words and lasting all of two minutes, the 16th president evoked the meaning and purpose of America in the midst of a deadly Civil War that has particular relevance to today’s polarized, diminished and adrift America under President Trump.

The context of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address underscores its relevance. Union armies had defeated the Confederates four months earlier in the decisive Battle of Gettysburg, the bloodiest in the Civil War. Haunted by grief at the war’s toll, Lincoln nevertheless saw himself as the guardian of the nation’s soul in abolishing slavery and preserving the republic. He warned the gathering of 15,000 that the Civil War — which would last another 17 months — was testing whether the nation that was “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal … can long endure.”

Yet the nation had to endure even if the war was threatening to tear it apart. “We are met on a great battlefield of that war,” said Lincoln. “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.” Evoking transcendent words like liberty, dedicate, consecrate, hallow, devotion, birth, freedom and God, Lincoln rallied the Union forces to persevere until the Confederates surrendered and the nation could emerge intact and stronger. He was also using the moral force of his presidency to put principle over privilege, pluralism over tribalism.

America has fallen far since Trump took the oath of office in 2016 through his solipsism and his brazen acts to preempt and pervert the constitution. While the list is long, the words he uses at rallies and in tweets to attack individuals and institutions opposing his maleficence reveal the extent of his transgressions: fake, suck, savages, shifty, liar, lowlife, human scum, go back.

Yet we also hear the echo of Lincoln’s message of duty, honor and warning in the words of public servants speaking out against Trump and his cabal. One such is Marie Yovanovitch, former ambassador to Ukraine, forced out for refusing to play along with Trump’s foreign policy shenanigans. In her deposition to the House impeachment investigators, she said: “I have served this nation honorably for more than 30 years. I, like my colleagues at the State Department, have always believed that we enjoyed a sacred trust with our government. We frequently put ourselves in harm’s way to serve this nation. And we do that willingly, because we believe in America and its special role in the world. We also believe that our government will protect us if we come under attack from foreign interests. That basic understanding no longer holds true.”

As we prepare to vote in the presidential election in less than a year, we should remember the concluding words of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address containing the most profound definition of democracy: “Government of the people, by the people, for the people.” Donald Trump is determined to turn the United States into a “government of me, by me, for me.” On Nov. 3, 2020, we will vote not only for candidates but also for the heart, mind and soul of America, for truth, accountability and rule of law so that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”