Day 3 -- The Lincoln Memorial

The Lincoln Memorial was Number One on Grandson John Riley's priority list, so Day 3 found us making our way there. Inside is a huge statue honoring our 16th President.

As we face the statue, to our left is inscribed the text of the Gettysburg Address. To the right is his Second Inaugural Address. On March 4, 1865, during the final days of the Civil War and only a month before he was assassinated he ended his address to a war-torn nation with these words:

                         "With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness
                          in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us 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 a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations." 

Seated, he is 19 feet tall. Given the same proportions, he would be 28 feet tall if he were standing. At 6 feet 4 inches, President Lincoln was indeed tall, but no where near that tall! Considering his character, perhaps 28 feet tall is not too great an exaggeration.

Two of my favorite Lincoln biographies are Carl Sandburg's which is divided into two The Prairie Years and The War Years and Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals which is a more politically in depth focus on his presidency.

While the boys took their time inside the Memorial, I sat near the top of the first set of steps and looked east from the Lincoln Memorial, across the reflecting pool along The Mall toward the Washington Monument.

As I sat there, a teacher talked to her class seated on the bottom three rows of steps. She talked about the building of the Memorial -- how long it took, how much it cost, where the stone came from to build it.


I thought about the Civil War, the bloodiest war in our Nation's history. The war that could have destroyed The United States which by that time had stood as a constitutional democracy only seventy-two years. Enough time to see a person into old age, but as a nation, only as many years as to bring it into adolescence.

We deplore the divisions wracking this country today, but it is nothing compared to that. The Nation survived that. The Constitution survived that and civil rights were nominally expanded to all men. Not enough, but a beginning.

There were scattered groups of people milling about. I met a couple from Switzerland using the Memorial as a landmark, a place well-known and easily identified, to meet friends. There was a tour group of Asians, another of Spanish speakers, another of Middle Eastern people, and more and more -- people from all across the nation and from around the world. There were families and couples and singles scattered about the grounds. But there were spaces between the groups.

I sat just feet away from where Dr. Martin Luther King addressed the nation so many years ago. When Dr. King spoke, there were no spaces between the people gathered on the Mall. It was a sea of people -- so many, so many. As far down the Mall as you could see. In his I Have a Dream speech he gave our Nation his vision: 

                 "I say to you today, my friends, even though we face the difficulties of today
                  and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the
                  American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up,
                  live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident,
                  that all men are created equal.'"

That was August 28th, 1963, in the midst of a nation divided by the same questions of civil rights for all our people. It was less than three months before another president was murdered -- President John F. Kennedy. A difficult time. A difficult time.

Since then, we have made giant strides forward, but there is still a ways to go. We will endure this current setback and advance civil rights still further for all people and "live out the true meaning" of the American Dream.

If I Had a Chance

image from the Guardian.com

A friend recently posted this question on Facebook, “If you had a chance to go to the concert of someone deceased, who would you choose?”

Aside from realizing that she should have used the word ‘whom’ (perhaps I’ve been spending too much time in edit mode) it occurred to me that I’d rather sit in on a lecture being given by Stephen Jay Gould. An evolutionary biologist, he wrote essays for Natural History magazine. Many of which were published as collections. These were my only opportunities to experience his knowledge and humor. Hens' Teeth and Horses' Toes, and The Flamingo's Smile are two that come to mind.

But the original question was about a concert performer. Okay. Freddie Mercury and Queen. It would have been loud and rowdy with lots of flash. “We Are the Champions” of the world!

And my mind was off and running. Of course there was Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, one of my favorite writers and activists. His novels presented the world from a little left of reality, a point of view that suited me perfectly. So maybe lunch with him. He was a WWII American prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany, during the firebombing by Allies. He was named Humanist of the Year in 1992 by the American Humanist Association.

Which brings to mind Isaac Asimov, a past president of the AHA and prolific author of science, both fiction and nonfiction. His science fiction is generally considered ‘hard’ science fiction meaning that his vision is consistent with what is a believable extrapolation from what science knows today. And his nonfiction is brilliant and clearly stated. From Atom I finally got the answer to my question about electricity. When you flip the switch in your living room, is it a particular electron generated in a particular power plant that has traveled down those miles of line that lights your world? Or is it an electron that was already in that bulb and is excited by an electron beside it in the wire that was excited by an electron beside it, and so on along those miles of line back to the generating plant?

Or instead of a concert or lunch with someone, I think I would like to march with Gandhi or Dr. King.

No. I think lunch with Margaret Burke-White. She photographed Gandhi and Stalin and so many interesting famous and nonfamous people in between.

Or Abigail Adams who was in on the ground floor at the founding of our nation. A competent and independent woman who would have many other interesting people at her dining table. Including Benjamin Franklin, of whom she probably disapproved in many ways, I’m sure I would think him a better story teller than her dear husband John.

I’ve got it!

Lunch with the artist Georgia O’Keefe who left New York City when it was the center of the world and embraced the wide open lands of New Mexico.

Dinner with Carl Sagan to plan our out-migration from Earth.

But, best of all, to wake up and have breakfast with Robin Williams during one of his quiet times between mania and depression.