I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. I first heard perhaps the most famous and impactful line in any of his speeches as a child during the final episode of Ken Burns’s magnificent The Civil War documentary series. Spoken on 4 March 1865, a month before the end of the Civil War and a few days further removed from Lincoln’s assassination, the lawyer from Springfield, Illinois concluded his address calling on all Americans to feel “malice toward none,” and “charity for all.” After all the pain caused by the war, many of Lincoln’s goals still seeming far too distant from reality, he called on our forebearers to: 

“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.”

Lately, I’ve wondered how best to categorize the year we’ve been living in. Could the upheaval of 2020, a combination of general public dissatisfaction with government, a global pandemic, and social and economic tensions boiling over after generations of bubbling, could all these combined be called a revolution of sorts? Could we be living through so consequential a time that in fifty or a hundred years, school children will place 2020 in the same column with the most recent global revolutionary years of 1989, 1968, 1918, 1848, 1789, and perhaps even 1776? I’ve also wondered, if we are living through a time which rhymes with Lincoln’s, are we in 1861, at the start of our national nightmare, or in 1865 at the moment of waking from that horror?

Yet when I think about Lincoln’s words again, one thing in particular strikes me. We are at our weakest as a country when we are divided. Today, when each side sees the other with such contempt, it’s hard to see how we could heal these divisions and sow back together these wounds that have cursed our country from its very inception with the conquest and colonization of this continent. Yet heal these divides we must. Someone is going to have to take the first step at reconciling the many factions and camps in this country, someone is going to have to reach across the chasm and offer a hand of friendship to someone on the other side. We need to learn to recognize the innate humanity in those we disagree with before we see their faults. We need to learn to grow past our hate.

Even a person who has committed the worst acts imaginable, people whose names live on in the darkest infamy, were still people like you and me. There are people out there who seek to divide us even further, to sow distrust among us until we are unable to bear the mere thought of one another anymore. Their power is fueled by our hatred, their lies take on the sense of truth only when so smelted by the fire of our hate. As long as we let our hate guide our actions and principles, as long as we make choices great and small based on that darkest emotion, they will win. 

Listen to the voices that offer us a message of unity and hope, to the ones who offer us a future that doesn’t seem bleak, to the ones who offer solutions instead of just spewing bile and denouncing their rivals as the enemy. I fundamentally believe that all things are created good, if I know anything for certain, it’s that. Look at it this way, why would a God who wished for evil to be the only option give us free will? It is up to us to choose how we act and react, think and feel. Another thing that I fundamentally believe in is that it’s up to us to make our world as we want it. God made this reality, it’s up to us as citizens of this reality to decide its future. 

True love, what many would say is the anthesis of hate, depends on free choices for survival. It’s up to us to decide which emotion our future will be shaped by: hate and its offspring distrust, fear, and bigotry, or love and its offspring hope, kindness, justice, and mercy. Let’s finish Mr. Lincoln’s work, and make 2020 the year when we began to at long last heal our nations wounds, care for each other as equals, and do what we must to earn that “just and lasting peace” for all of us, the oppressed and their erstwhile oppressor too. After all, if we leave even a single person behind, hate’s cold song will still be there for yet another generation to hear.

It’s up to us to live up to our forebearers’ visions and to build the foundations for our descendants’ dreams. Hope and pray for those visions and dreams all you want, but if you want them to come true, you and I, each and every one of us, must act on them. 

I’ve had my say, now it’s your turn.