My Thoughts on This Day

It struck me that the Gettysburg Address, a good read any day, is especially appropriate today. As you know, it was given by President Abraham Lincoln in Pennsylvania on November 19, 1863, almost exactly 146 years ago. With only a very few changes it would be just as appropriate at another Pennsylvania battlefield on this wet September day in 2009. It was at Stoneycreek Township where the passengers of United Flight #93 fought bravely back and forced the hijackers to crash the airplane rather than continue on to their target in Washington, DC. The Battle of Stoneycreek should be no less remembered than Gettysburg for at Stoneycreek Todd Beamer and the other passengers gave their full measure of devotion behind the battle cry, "Let's roll!" They were unarmed, untrained and unprepared but they knew that they needed to fight back. They knew that the hijackers were on a suicide mission and they were determined that they would not allow their plane to be used as a weapon against the United States. They courageously fought back and successfully aborted the hijacker's mission of crashing into the Capitol Building but at the cost of their own lives.

Other heroes in New York and Washington, DC, rushed in to help. They went up the stairwells, stayed with the injured and comforted others knowing that they might die. And die they did as the buildings collapsed on and around them. They were afraid, I am sure, but they did not hesitate to do their duty. They were firemen, police officers and civilians. They could have stood back and stayed safe but they died as heroes.

We've had others like them. They fought at Concord, Tripoli, New Orleans and Gettysburg. They fought at the Alamo, the Little Big Horn and Belleau Wood. They fought at the Marne, in the skies over Tokyo and at Normandy. They fought at the Battle of the Bulge, Iwo Jima, Chosin and Khe Sahn. They fight today in Iraq and Afghanistan. We are, as a nation, blessed with men and women who will face the challenge of battle afraid more of letting their fellow combatants and citizens down than they are of death. True courage is exemplified by this: That they did their duty.

I shall never accept that this day is a "national day of service" as a politician intoned self righteously this morning. He cannot to suit his personal ideology change this day from a day in which we remember the victims and the heroes.

And so remember I will.

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 here on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it 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 can never forget what they did here.

It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they have, thus far, so nobly carried on. 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 here gave the last full measure of devotion - that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom; and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

My God bless the victims and heroes who died this day in 2001.