A Penny for Your Thoughts about Lincoln

When I was a kid, and this was a school day, we had it off. It was Abraham Lincoln's birthday and living in central New Jersey we observed it while hearing that some states south of the Mason-Dixon line didn't.

Lincoln was celebrated as a person who had made a difference in his time and whose shadow was cast through our own lives. Now, he's been rolled into an upcoming three-day weekend and we're having a White Sale (gotta love the irony!), c'mon down!

There were a huge number of issues bound up in something as simple and stark as 'slavery' but that's the headline, the casus Bellum. Dispassionate historians and anthropologists agree slavery wasn't an invention of the New World, but an extension of a practice stretching back thousands of years across the entire world. 

We in the USA still have not yet fully faced up to what was done by some to others. Instead of confronting and resolving, we continue to equivocate and rationalize. It's bizarre we would call the War Between the States (its official name, btw) the "Civil War" since historians agree it was often anything but. With other nations picking sides to advance their own agenda, the two sides, bloodied and bedraggled, fought one another from 1861 through the spring of 1865, when the Confederate States of America, prostrate and exhausted, surrendered and, say some, Modern America began. 

And the more we've changed, the more we've stayed the same. Given an opportunity to begin again with 'malice towards none and charity to all' as offered by the soon-to-be-murdered reelected Lincoln, instead, we as a nation veered from that path and have continued to settle old scores and create new wounds through the latter half of the 19th, all of the 20th and, now, into the 21st century.

We've institutionalized and internalized treating huge segments of our own countrymen as suspects instead of citizens and when cell phone camera footage turns up to disrupt the fairytale we've told ourselves about being the greatest country on earth we attack the messengers because it's easier than fixing the problem. 

We put Lincoln on a one-cent piece and named a car after him.
What more could anyone possibly want?
-bill kenny