Wednesday, September 09, 2009

Historic words etched in stone...and motorola screens

Holy cow, I feel like I've been blogging about Gettysburg for the last two months. I think this last posting should finish it up, these pictures were taken at the actual disputed spot that Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address. All the pennies on the monument were put there by visiting tourists. Sara and I checked, and there were no slots for debit cards, so we weren't able to properly honor the giver of the famous address.

As always, I've got loads of partially useful facts about the address itself, but I think I can boil them all down to this single sentence: Four months after the battle in Gettysburg, Lincoln spoke for about two minutes, preceded by an old guy who spoke for over two hours, all this while only half of the 7,500 dead soldiers had been buried. That's pretty sad stuff. The words of the address are super moving, I remember reading them while standing in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. We were there pretty late at night in January, just Sara and I, and we spent nearly an hour reading all the inscriptions up and down the walls. The enormous statue of President Lincoln stared down on us as we read his famous words in gigantic stone letters. This is in great contrast to the experience had by the field-tripping youth at the Gettysburg Address site who spent most of their historical tour texting to one another. Or perhaps they were using their cell phone apps to read the Gettysburg Address and commenting to one another about it via text message.
The best-known portions are at the beginning and the ending of his brief speech, but I also love the stuff in the middle. I wonder if presidents come up with better stuff to say when tragic events occur? I guess what I really like about presidential speeches of those days were that these are the actual words of President Lincoln, not his assistant speech writer twice removed. Perhaps presidents of nowadays would write their own speeches if they had someting more important than greenhouse gasses and health insurance to write about. Gettysburg was an incredible experience, I don't think I've ever put so many words on this blog about any other place. If you can get there, you just gotta make the trip.

1 comment:

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