68: Lincoln's Second Inaugural
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From W.B. E.C. Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life, Am I A Glass? Our story today begins in 1865 and ends this year, today. The moment in 1865 where we start is on March 4th, the day Abraham Lincoln delivered his second inaugural address. I don't know if you've ever read this speech, but it's this incredible document, just four paragraphs long. At the time that he delivered this, the Civil War was ending, over a half million Americans dead. Lincoln uses the speech to ponder the question, why have we been visited with this war? Here are his words, "Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude of the duration, which it already has attained. Each looked for an easier triumph and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes his aid against the other. The Almighty has his own purposes." And at this point in the speech, Lincoln posits this incredible image that slavery is a kind of original sin on this continent, an original sin for which all Americans must pay. He says, "Finally do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away, yet if God wills it to continue, until all the wealth pawed by the bondsman's 250 years of unrequited toils shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid with another drawn with the sword. As was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we're in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations." Well, today in our program, on this Fourth of July weekend, we raise this question. How are we doing? Obsolving ourselves of our original sin. To answer that, let's face forward to the 1990s. You hear how I'm talking now? I don't talk like this when I'm around my friends who don't speak like this. I mean, it's just, you know, when I go to school, like this, it'll go to school like this, everyone is speaking like this, so, you know, I have to do my best to blend in, you know, which I kind of do pretty good. They don't, you know, I pretty much have everybody thrown off about me. They pretty much know nothing of where I come from. This is Eliyahu Miller. When I recorded this, he was a sophomore at a Chicago high school named for Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln Park, an enriched neighborhood in Chicago's mostly white north side. Eliyahu rode the bus for nearly an hour a day to get there from his home, and a neighborhood in Chicago's mostly black, mostly segregated south side. One measure of how far we have to go in healing the wounds of the past is the distance Eliyahu had to go between home and school. It is hard on a person, you know, to come to Lincoln Park, and your friends, they have, they have, you know, $50 in change, you know, and then some, and they have these expensive things, and then you go home and you're slapped in the face by reality. That's, you know, that's why I spend so much time at school.
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