Why President Obama Won't Go To Gettysburg

A lot of people just don’t want to go someplace when they don’t understand why they are going.

Me, I am wondering why I can’t keep the healthcare plan I like, just as President Obama promised.

So I wonder if President Obama understands promises.

He took us for a ride. I didn’t understand why we were going — but I went anyway. I assumed the president was making such a huge change in our health care system for the good of all: all the people, by the people,  for the people. So I went along.

But President Obama apparently did not understand the social contract between the American people and the President of the United States. It is a contract of trust. We elect our president and even when we as individuals don’t vote for him, he is still our president. We trust him. We follow him. We know, or at least expect, he’ll make all his decisions with the good of all of us  — all the people — first in his mind. We are not a nation run by the rich or totally for the poor — or any other interest group. We are dedicated to government of the people, by the people,  for the people

And one might wonder what all President Obama just plain fails to understand: like reacting to the killing of the U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and three other Americans at Benghazi on September 11, 2012.

Americans wonders what the heck happened to President Obama’s “Red Line” promise on chemical weapons to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. It’s a good bet that Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran, Israel and other nations also wonder why President Obama didn’t fulfill that promise.

We wonder where all the stimulus money spent to revive the U.S. economy went.  And we wonder why the economy has never recovered. We wonder in fact, why President Obama hasn’t done more to fix the economy for the good of all the people, by the people and for the people.

Americans want and need leaders. Honest leaders. Our time in history is no different from any other that way.

We want and need and expect leaders to be Chief Executives, to make hard decisions. To make right decisions. Because of this contract between the American people and the president, Americans have, throughout history, embraced government of the people, by the people,  for the people.

President Lincoln knew that even as the nation buried the dead during the Civil War, Americans would respond to his call to continue to  work toward government of the people, by the people,  for the people.

Sadly, President Obama has decided not to go to that historic place where President Lincoln called all Americans to respond again to government of the people, by the people,  for the people.

President Obama won’t stand where “Honest Abe” stood when he gave the Gettysburg address.

We should not be surprised. He has no idea why he should go. He doesn’t get it.

John Francis Carey
Peace and Freedom

Related:

President Obama will not attend the 150th anniversary celebration of Abraham Lincoln’s  Gettysburg Address

Myths and mysteries about the Gettysburg Address

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President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, November 19, 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 can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not  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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