OPINION
4A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • MONDAY, MAY 29, 2017
THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESS
Founded in 1873
DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor
LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor
BETTY SMITH, Advertising Manager
JEREMY FELDMAN, Circulation Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
‘OF THE PEOPLE,
BY THE PEOPLE,
FOR THE PEOPLE’
President Abraham Lincoln delivered this address at the dedication of the
cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on Nov. 19, 1863.
our 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.
OUR VIEW
F
Today is about
the cost of war
oday we honor those who made the ultimate sacrifice —
giving their life because their country sent them to war.
Americans answer the call. Generation after gener-
ation, the urge to serve our nation draws excellent people into
military service. They defend us from foreign threats, protect
vital interests around the world, and gain unique experiences
and job skills that strengthen the U.S. once they return to civil-
ian life.
Living here as we do in small communities and rural areas,
we take special pride in personally knowing servicemen and
women. Spring high school graduation ceremonies often include
news about local kids making the leap into becoming adult
women and men by joining the armed forces. We then fol-
low their accomplishments and adventures on their parents’
Facebook pages and in printed news items. It is among the sig-
nature experiences of small-town life to encounter young peo-
ple we witnessed growing up — perhaps playing on the basket-
ball court — now returned on leave from a military assignment
someplace far away.
These relationships between civilians and active-service per-
sonnel are some of the strongest glue holding the nation together.
It is fundamental to the essential national DNA of the U.S. that
we respect and appreciate our fellow citizens who man the guard
posts of democracy.
There was a time when Congress and the White House con-
tained many veterans. They had personally witnessed the hor-
rible cost of war, in the form of friends shot down before their
eyes. Because there is no draft, there are now few veterans
among our nation’s top leadership — nor do many of their chil-
dren serve in the armed forces. War has become something they
send other Americans’ children to do. And in all fairness, fewer
U.S. citizens in general have close kinfolk in the line of fire.
Most of us, though, in every station of life share a deep and sin-
cere appreciation for our honored war dead.
Since the awful events of Sept. 11, 2001, it is generally
reported that more than 5,000 U.S. service personnel have died.
More than 50,000 have been physically wounded. Many more
suffer from combat-related stress disorders. So even though the
generations that fought in World War II, Korea and Vietnam are
passing away, we will be paying tribute to modern American
warriors for the next half century or more.
President Ulysses S. Grant — as good a general as the U.S.
ever had — said, “There never was a time when, in my opin-
ion, some way could not be found to prevent the drawing of the
sword.” Our sad drumbeat of wars in the 20th and 21st centu-
ries informs us that we are still too far away from learning this
lesson.
But war is not the true subject for Memorial Day. We honor
the personal sacrifices that men and women have made in the
name of our nation and its Constitution.
We who live in the relative comfort of 2017 cannot ignore
these sacrifices. We cannot commend one soldier’s valor and
minimize another’s, depending on whether we deem one a “good
war” and the other not.
What we honor this day is selfless service to the coun-
try. But if this day is to be anything but an excuse for a day off
from work, we must put meat on the bones of otherwise empty
promises.
History teaches the danger faced by powerful nations where
the majority of the citizenry no longer remembers the hard-
ship and realities faced by its defenders. It becomes far too easy
to expend their lives for meager pay to achieve too little, then
bringing them home and forgetting them.
Repairing the disconnect between decision-makers and these
sacrifices is essential to the long-term survival of America’s
great experiment in democracy. Honoring life is the best pay-
ment we can make to the dead.
Meanwhile, genuine respect for America’s war dead is best
translated into remembering living veterans and tending to their
needs. Memorial Day is only the start, not the finish, of recog-
nizing the debt we owe to veterans. Truly honoring them means
embodying their values and honor in our own lives every day of
the year.
T
AP Photo/J. David Ake
Members of the veterans support group “Ruck to Remember” walk
along the National Mall in Washington Monday as they continue
their Memorial Day march to Arlington National Cemetery.
AP Photo/Virginia Mayo
European Union flags blow in the wind at half-staff outside EU headquarters in Brussels. The flags were set
at half-staff to remember those killed and injured in the attack at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester.
The way they kill now
By TIMOTHY EGAN
New York Times News Service
A
RRAS, France — In the
springtime of 100 years ago,
nations that shared a Christian
heritage slaughtered one another over
a few miles of mud.
In just one battle,
the great powers
of Europe fought
for more than a
month outside
this magnificently
reconstructed medieval city, and
suffered 280,000 casualties.
At the same time, French
infantrymen began to mutiny after
200,000 of their young men fell —
dead, wounded or missing — in
another senseless grind of human
flesh to the south.
All of that — the poisonous gas,
the mowing down of teenage boys in
ashen fields, the legless legions of the
Lost Generation — is behind us. In
its place, a century later, are cowards
who kill children in the name of
religious perversion.
Manchester, where the 22 died
Monday and more than 60 people
were injured in the worst terrorist
attack on British soil in more than a
decade, would seem small by com-
parison. Some perspective is in order.
But every war is awful in its own
way. Manchester was badly bombed
during World War II. Those planes
were under the command of Adolf
Hitler, a corporal in France during
World War I, who later reached
deeper into the bowels of hell search-
ing for more sophisticated forms of
savagery.
The homemade bomb that killed
those kids at a concert a few days ago
— one victim was an 8-year-old —
packed a disproportionate amount of
firepower. Old-fashioned war, as the
saying goes, is diplomacy by other
means. There’s a certain warped
rationality to it.
What happened in Manchester
is unexplainable. The Islamic State
called the killer — identified as
22-year-old Salman Abedi, a British-
born citizen of Libyan descent — a
soldier. Nothing could be further
from the truth.
Abedi was a psychopath — dis-
possessed in a tired part of England,
perhaps, and warped by a toxic strain
of Islam, but a psychopath nonethe-
less. The question of the moment is:
Are there enough people like him
to destabilize Europe? World War I,
after all, started with the lone assassi-
nation of an obscure Balkan figure.
The child killers of modern
Europe have no armies, no tanks or
cannons at their disposal. They are
stateless murderers plotting from
failed-state ghettos like Libya. Their
terror comes from the element of sur-
prise, from turning a pop concert, a
national holiday, a Christmas market,
into its own peculiar Western Front.
They bring an element of lethal men-
ace to everyday life.
The autocrats
of modern
terror seethe
and plot in the
shadows, and
their control
is limited to
a handful of
fellow child
killers.
When you see the prosthetics on
display at the Museum of the Great
War in the Somme Valley town of
Peronne — fake noses and eyes for
faces scraped of their features by
artillery — when you try to imagine
630,000 war widows in France in
1919, you can’t help but think that
we have made progress of a sort.
After all, the Great War, as it was
initially called, sucked up lives at rate
of almost 50,000 a day at one point.
The Germans committed atrocities
against civilians in Belgium and
reduced the Cathedral of Arras to
rubble. The soil of northern France,
pockmarked with war craters, is all
one big burial ground for lost souls
— the graveyards you see, 410 mil-
itary cemeteries, and the graveyards
you don’t see.
When the war ended, after 17
million deaths worldwide, a headline
in Britain’s Daily Mirror proclaimed:
“Democracy Triumphs Over the Last
of the Autocrats.”
If only. Another hundred-year
anniversary now marks the Russian
Revolution — the collapse of the
czar, power seized by the Bolsheviks,
followed by decades of crimes
against humanity committed by
heartless and autocratic followers of
Karl Marx.
The autocrats of modern terror
seethe and plot in the shadows, and
their control is limited to a handful
of fellow child killers. Their design,
such as it is, is to sweep away basic
democratic values and put Europe
in lockdown. Britain just raised its
threat alert to the highest level, and
the new French president, Emmanuel
Macron, is seeking an extension of
emergency powers for three more
months.
No leader in Europe has shown
Churchillian will or insight. Nor is
anyone here looking to President
Donald Trump for guidance. The
70-year-old Innocent Abroad is try-
ing to get through his first foreign trip
without suffering from exhaustion
brought on by reading his cue cards.
For something stirring, Trump
could look to his own passport,
and the words of John F. Kennedy
embossed inside: “Let every nation
know, whether it wishes us well or
ill, that we shall pay any price, bear
any burden, meet any hardship,
support any friend, oppose any foe,
in order to ensure the survival and the
success of liberty.”
Quaint words to Trump, and
foreign, given his affinity for world
leaders clamping down on liberty.
Still, you never know when an acorn
can find a blind pig.
And what exactly did Pope
Francis tell him? Neither side is
leaking. Francis is sly, though. He
has enough sense of history to know
that the wars of today could easily
escalate into the wars of yesterday.