Gettysburg

07 Jun 2021

Today’s prompt: “Rewrite the Gettysburg Address for today’s audience.”

Four score and – wait, no, that’s the old number. Uh, wait, a score is 20, right? So it’s what, 10 score? No, 12, right? I cannot math today. Aw, fuck it, nobody measures things in scores anymore.

Anyway, back in 1776, our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation. It has been said they conceived it in liberty and dedicated it to the proposition that all men are created equal. Given the fact that most of these dudes owned slaves, it’s fair to say they got a lot of stuff wrong from the jump and that America has never fully lived up to its promise. But despite our flaws, our history, our institutions imbued with systemic racism, we must attempt to fulfill that promise nonetheless.

And here we are now in the middle of our second civil war, figuring out whether this nation can last much longer. On this very ground we’re standing on, a pitched and bloody battle was fought in that war. We are here to bury our dead and consecrate this ground.

But we can’t bless this ground. We can’t make it any more holy than the brave men and women who gave their lives here do. People like Katie Turpin, Jesus Rodríguez, and [insert your name here], along with thousands of others who have died in the war to protect our democracy. The world will forget what we say here today, but it won’t forget what they did.

Those of us who are still alive must finish their work. And I don’t mean by dying on a battlefield. By making sure they don’t die in vain. By making sure our country remains united, yes. But more importantly, by making sure our country remains a democracy. By making sure our country listens to the will of its people.¹ By making sure that government of the people, by the people, for the people, will not die the way [insert your name here] did.