Today is Memorial Day.
My wife and sister-in-law are
heading to Pratt, Kansas to place flowers on headstones and my sons are serving
as greeters at Maple Grove Cemetery here in Wichita. As a military kid and
veteran myself, this day is one of pride and reflection.
Today's thought is simple:
Remember.
I can't express my thoughts better
than Lincoln did more than 151 years ago, so I won't even try. I will let his
words, and my camera speak for themselves. The images are from Gettysburg National Military Park, Gettysburg National Cemetery, Maple Grove Cemetery (Wichita, KS) and monuments and memorials from Washington DC.
"Fourscore
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."
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