Words, Ideas, Fireworks, and Other Powerful Forces

 

Today we’re celebrating the 4th of July. Usually, if we spend any time at all considering why we are celebrating this holiday, we think of the Revolutionary War and the Declaration of Independence.

 

But this year, July 4 falls the day after the 150th anniversary of the Union victory at the horrific Battle of Gettysburg, the event generally considered to be the major turning point in the Civil War that eventually led to the re-solidifying of both the United States and the concept of democracy.

 

Four and a half months after this crucial battle at the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, which left between 46,000 and 51,000 soldiers dead (from both sides) and effectively halted Robert E. Lee’s invasion of the North, President Abraham Lincoln gave a short speech at a dedication ceremony for the Gettysburg National Cemetery to honor the dead Union soldiers.

 

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is often considered one of the greatest American speeches ever given. He gave his address after a speech by Edward Everett, whose two-hour oration was supposed to have been the official “Gettysburg Address.” By contrast, Lincoln’s speech was listed on the program as merely “Dedication Remarks, by the President of the United States.” But while no one remembers or even recognizes Everett’s lengthy speech, every American can at least recite the first few words of Lincoln’s short, ten-sentence speech: “Four score and seven years ago…”

 

There are at least five different versions of Lincoln’s speech, all with slight variations (writers never stop tinkering), and at the time his words were greeted with widely different responses from different newspapers and critics. Some thought it was succinct and poignant. Others thought it was simply too short to have been any good.

 

But after reading his speech again yesterday, for the first time in years, I am struck by the sheer brilliance of his ideas, his intent, and his emotions, and I’m astounded at his ability to sum up a war, its devastation, and its meaning for the future of our country and humanity with so few words.

 

It’s said that the ability to read and write well help develop a higher level of thinking. The more command we have over language, the more penetrating and rich our ideas can become. Language paves the way for creativity and higher-order ideas. Lincoln’s speech demonstrates how the two go hand-in-hand.

 

In an era when the bulk of our communications seem to consist of emoticons and abbreviations (LOL), are we abbreviating our ideas and emotions, too? When was the last time we penned an email in which we carefully analyzed our thoughts and expressed them so carefully that others were moved by them, instead of just forwarding the latest sound-bite pithy slogan designed merely to inflame or amuse, but not really to inform or – heaven forbid – call to explore more deeply? When we write well, we order our thoughts and ideas into logical progressions. By doing that, we may notice the gaps we’re ignoring that require new thinking. Or perhaps we see where our own arguments break down, and we make space for alternate ideas. Or maybe we see the pieces slide together into a perfect whole, and we can express those ideas in new ways that will cast them in a new, more thoughtful light.

 

But if we let a generation of students move away from in-depth writing and reading, what does that bode for our own future? Will higher-level thinking wither as the ability to order our thoughts into effective written arguments is de-valued? Are we headed into a new Dark Age?

 

The courageous ideas of Abraham Lincoln, expressed in a handful of passionate, deeply-felt words, helped pull a country out of its Dark Age once. Our world could use a few more thinkers like him right now.

 

Here is the entire text for Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (from the Bliss version of the text, to which he signed his name, although there are slight variations from other versions):

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 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 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.