Trump’s First Year and How He Is Wrecking Lincoln’s America |
I visited the Lincoln Memorial last weekend.
The colossal 19-foot statue of Abraham Lincoln loomed above me, looking towards the East. Thinking big thoughts. My friend used to leave cupcakes on the steps for him when she was a child.
It may be inspired by the Greek Parthenon, but it is built of Indiana limestone and Colorado Yule marble and stands for everything great about America.
Just outside, in the cold sunshine, is the spot where, in 1963, Martin Luther King spoke uncomfortable truths about his dream for the nation he fought and loved.
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural Address are inscribed on the cavernous walls. Reading them in silence, shoulder to shoulder with tourists from around the world. No scrolling here. Just scrolls. And my eyes filled with tears.
They were not for the wife I lost a little over a year ago. Nor for her mom, who died last week of a broken heart.
They were not even for the two-year-old granddaughter who barely knows me now that I live 6,000 miles away.
The tears were for America.
Like so many others, I came to this country with my family as an immigrant, dreaming of a better life. It has been so much more.
But one year after Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office, I despair for our future.
In his Gettysburg Address, Lincoln presented the Civil War as a test of the nation’s principles of equality and liberty. Whether the U.S. could “long endure.”
In the November 19, 1863, speech transcribed in stone on the south wall of the memorial, the 16th president was referring to slavery and the proposition that all are created equal. If the country could emerge from the 1861-65 war united with these fundamental beliefs intact, then he believed there was tangible hope of a thriving future.
On the north interior wall, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Speech, delivered on March 4, 1865, strikes a similar theme. If you look carefully halfway down the first panel, you can see where the engraver made a mistake with the word “FUTURE.” He mispelled it as “EUTURE.”
There has been an attempt at a correction, but I........