Osama bin Laden is Dead

With the death of Osama bin Laden, America has breathed a collective sigh of relief, tempered with pain for the great losses he caused her and the world, and lightened with the renewed conviction that the United States is not a fading power, that she still stands for good and the determination to make good prevail.

Like all Americans, I had tears in my eyes this morning when I heard the news. I thought of Ground Zero and of President Lincoln on the field at Gettysburg, trying to bolster a nation that had suffered greatly and was still at war. His great Gettysburg Address could have been written for today.

“Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon 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.”