MICHAEL VENTURA – LETTERS AT 3AM
DID ABRAHAM LINCOLN DESERVE A SECOND TERM?
Austin Chronicle – December 14, 2012
Well, did he? Many men thought not. (Women had no say.)
Republican Abraham Lincoln carried 22 of the 25 states loyal to the Union, crushing Democrat George B. McClellan in the electoral count, but the popular vote wasn’t so lopsided: 55% to 45%.
Continue reading Ventura: Did Abraham Lincoln deserve a second term?
I have been dismayed to watch the progressive assault on Abraham Lincolns life, morals, policies, and legacy. More than dismayed, I have been angered, because I have felt a deep connection to this amazing man since I first read of him so many decades ago. The more I learn, the more admirable he seems. As Carl Sandburg said, as soft as velvet, as hard as steel. And we owe to him, as much as to any other single individual, the preservation not only of a political entity called the United States, but the principle that ordinary individuals are capable of governing themselves, which would have been seriously challenged, had the United States broken up in the 1860s. Add to that legacy the final solution to the problem of how to remove slavery from the national conscience and the national economy, and you have a lifes work that ought to be, and until relatively recently was, beyond the reach of slander and detraction.
But slander apparently is an irresistible impulse in people. Being of themselves reproached by the existence of so much excellence, perhaps they feel compelled to pull it down, to say that the excellence really didnt exist, that it was all public relations and hero worship. Perhaps it never occurs to them that hero worship proceeds from the perception that some people transcend themselves and their limitations to become heroes. If the tide is again turning, and people again are beginning to see how much we owe Mr. Lincoln, I will be glad.
Why Lincoln Still Matters
By Matthew Carey
CNN
LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) — Two hundred years after his birth in a log cabin in Kentucky, Abraham Lincoln continues to fascinate.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
9:30 AM.
Mr. Lincoln, a proud day. We owe it as much to you as to anyone.
You owe it to yourselves. The angels of your better nature — as I said in my first inaugural address.
It is America becoming ever more the symbol of the world, isn’t it? That’s how I see it, anyway.
A symbol, yes — but perhaps more than a symbol. Perhaps you might say in truth and not in metaphor that is a magical miniature, still, as it was to a lesser extent in my time and as it may become to an even larger extent in times beyond yours. It is the form into which energies may be concentrated and hardened into reality.
One of my altered-state conversations with Joseph Smallwood, an American of the 1800s, contained this description of Abraham Lincoln’s persuasive powers as part of a discussion of how everyone sees the world differently. As usual, sentences in italics are mine, those in Roman are Joseph’s.
[December 27, 2005]
Your mental processes furnish the analogies, always. That’s what they do. What somebody sets in front of you is one thing. The connections it suggests is a different thing. That is why three people looking at the same thing not only have their different opinions about it among them—they each are in their own world about it in a way. They each think about other things that suggest themselves. So you can see how rich this makes things. You take a thousand men surviving a battle, or even a hard winter, and they will each one of them have been associating it with stuff from their past before that – and not just in that lifetime, either! Everything they are is affected by everything that happens to every part of them. You think that’s simple?
It ain’t that it’s hard to understand how disagreements arise. It is more surprising when any two people see things the same! That’s why if you want to persuade people, you have to do it with pictures. And that was Mr. Lincoln’s specialty.
Now, don’t fight me on this, and you might learn something. State your objections so we get it on the record, so to speak. Continue reading Mr. Lincoln’s Specialty