Today is both a day of wonder and a day of reflection. Forty years ago, RFK was cut down at his moment of victory, just as 103 years earlier, our greatest president (thus far) was denied any opportunity to savor the victory to which he had lead this country, by assassin's bullets. But this is also the day when, taking a deep breath, the entire world looks with amazed eyes at the nomination of Barack Obama, a man with both African and European ancestry, to lead our country forward, our stained and dishonored nation, still and once more representing, as Barack quoted on Tuesday, the "last, best hope of earth." There is a lump in my throat and a tear in my eye as I remember, as Jesse Jackson reminded us from a summit in Tanzania, "the martyrs who paid such a big price for this moment." What is it about America that causes people the whole world over to regard us with so much intensity, as something special and remarkable?
We all know well that America is far from perfect, and yet we also know that the principles on which we were founded are the only true principles upon which a free and just society can be based. And we know that these principles are under constant seige, from forces within our society as well as from the outside, but still the message continues to inspire heroic sacrifice to defend and promote those ideals. So I'm going to quote another famous speech, in honor of the men and women who bled and died in freedom's cause:
Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon 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 cannot dedicate - we cannot consecrate - we cannot 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.
For all of those who didn't live to see this day, our thanks can best be expressed by renewed efforts to consumate this campaign with victory in November!