Some Sunday morning Love for #Occupy Wall Street

Too often monumental moments in history are taught in our schools as so much rote. Too often we fail to connect the lessons learned from our history to the occasions happening right inside, or outside, of our own front doors.

This Sunday morning, employing no poetic license or finagling, I offer a bit of writing that sustains me in hope that it sustains all those who stand and sleep outside in the cold in my stead in Zuccotti Park.

Many of these recent days I have felt much like Whitman, too old and broken of body, too poor and tenuously employed as such that I dare not scoff such employment that so many of my peers so desperately seek. Much as Whitman, at the start of the Civil War, "vowed to live a 'purged' and 'cleansed' life," I have shut down many of my worst distractions and hunkered down to business.

It is my work that is all that I have, and all that I have to offer. So I busy myself to it, and play more rarely than I have these past few years. And hope that what bits of it I complete will be of service to some in any way that might meet that which so many have done which has been so dearly of service to me.

This Sunday morning, as we close another month and look forward to a new one that pushes us further on toward winter, I dig deeply back 148 years and offer a bit of prose, a slice of oratory so meaningful that it grounds me in my own dedication. I am no nationalist, being far more interested in what brings us, as humans, together than what serves to divide us. Yet I see in what is being created at Occupy Wall Street, the same push to bring us together in service of our individual and collective survival as I do in this speech which is well over a century old.

They are seeking, these few dissidents who speak for so many of us, "a new birth of freedom," where--even if we can not yet defeat the stranglehold of capital, we can at least demand that it behave more humanely. In the end, it can not. It is capital.

But we can. We can demand that we, humans, behave more humanely toward each other. And we can demand, at the very least, as has been demanded time and again, "that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

© Abraham Lincoln Online

The Gettysburg Address Gettysburg, Pennsylvania November 19, 1863 On June 1, 1865, Senator Charles Sumner commented on what is now considered the most famous speech by President Abraham Lincoln. In his eulogy on the slain president, he called it a "monumental act." He said Lincoln was mistaken that "the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here." Rather, the Bostonian remarked, "The world noted at once what he said, and will never cease to remember it. The battle itself was less important than the speech."

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on 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 battle-field 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 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 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.