Afternoon all,
As we work and wait I’m sending along four inspirations from our history that speak to me every day, and that have powerfully animated our work here at Hopium over the past few challenging years. I felt that on this consequential day, one that could mean so much for our future, it was important to spend time meditating on what really is at stake in this election - * freedom*.
First, FDR’s Four Freedoms:
Next, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address:
Gettysburg Address
Delivered at Gettysburg, Pa.
Nov. 19th 1863
“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 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.”
Third, from The Declaration of Independence:
In Congress, July 4, 1776
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
For our Founders “Pursuit of Happiness” came after “Life” and “Liberty” - something we need to keep in mind as we work to make things better and put things right in the months ahead.
Fourth, Jefferson’s remarkable** “Barbarous Ancestors”** passage:
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Please feel free to share other inspirations as we keep working to run up the score tonight and take a critical step forward in ensuring a new birth of freedom here and everywhere in the arduous days ahead - Simon
