When President Abraham Lincoln gave the 272-word Gettysburg Address in 1863, he opened with a direct reference to the writing of our Declaration of Independence in 1776: “Four score and seven years ago.” To underscore his opening sentence, he ended with “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Lincoln understood the grave danger our country was facing and knew that, for the nation to survive, it was going to need incredibly strong and forceful leadership. Thank God Lincoln provided that incredibly strong and forceful leadership.
To further understand the true and immense leadership qualities of Lincoln, one has to understand the last paragraph of his inaugural address in March 1861: “I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
When Lincoln used the phrase, “mystic chords of memory,” I believe he was referring to the historical consciousness of America and the absolute danger the Civil War posited to the future of our great nation and its historical consciousness. Sadly, I believe we are witnessing that same danger today, as we watch our country slowly disintegrate due to an absolute and total lack of incredibly strong and forceful leadership.
The concept of “fundamentally changing” our society and destroying our mystic chords of memory gained incredible momentum during the eight years of President Barack Obama. It was stifled by President Donald Trump; however, it has now gained full momentum with President Joe Biden. The movements of defunding our police, cancel culture, wokeness, identity politics, sexual orientation/identity, teaching critical race theory, the concept of indoctrination vs. educating in our colleges and schools, The 1619 Project, the idea of a borderless country, and the constant preaching of White privilege and institutional racism are policies and programs driven by the Biden administration and what I call its “public relations arm” — our print and televised media.
Biden’s support and the constant hammering of these policies and ideas by the “public relations arm” of the Democratic Party is destroying the historical consciousness of our country. Our history is being rewritten in a good vs. evil scenario through many of the policies and programs identified above. We are quickly becoming a culture without a memory, and our past is not being given the respect it deserves. Our past is not all glorious, but it is ours, and to deny its existence by describing it as good vs. evil divides the people of this country in similar fashion to what occurred during the Civil War.
We have lost the concept of the nuclear family and become so secular that we’ve forgotten the founding principles upon which I believe this country was created. We use words to hurt and destroy people and also to redefine who we really are.
The Biden administration and its “public relations arm” are extremely vocal when it comes to “fundamentally changing” our society but I have heard little from them on the attempted assassination of a Supreme Court justice. Is silence an implicit approval of the attempt? Have any of our three congressional representatives, ardent supporters of President Biden, said anything?
Remember the closing words of President Lincoln’s first inaugural address. He successfully guided us through the horrific years of the Civil War and put the Union back together. We are in desperate need of that strong, dynamic and forceful leadership once again, or the 240-plus years of our experiment in democracy will fail and fail miserably.
Our current president is totally lacking in the strong, dynamic and forceful leadership needed to guide our great nation. Instead, he is trampling the “mystic chords of memory” upon which we built this great nation.
Retired U.S. Army Reserve Col. Frank Daniels
Dover
