[Peace-discuss] July 4 parade

[C. G. Estabrook]

[At last Sunday's meeting we mentioned this year's "Champaign County Freedom 
Celebration" <http://www.july4th.net/>.  AWARE has a tradition of excellent 
entries in the July 4 parade -- none better than last year's splendid effort. 
People in AWARE have worked hard over the years to combat the jingoistic 
assumptions of the parades' themes.  This year's theme is (predictably) "The 
Lasting Legacy of Lincoln."  So I suggest we take the bull (and the 
alliteration) by the horns and produce something like last year's rolling 
billboards. Here's a first draft; all the quotes are Lincoln's.  --CGE]



	THE ANTI-WAR ANTI-RACISM EFFORT REMEMBERS
	LESSONS FROM LINCOLN ON WAR AND WORK

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     * Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem 
it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may 
choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose, and you allow him to make 
war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this 
respect, after having given him so much as you propose.

     * Such will be a great lesson of peace: teaching men that what they cannot 
take by election, neither can they take it by war; teaching all the folly of 
being the beginners of a war.

     * Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, 
under a just God, can not long retain it.

     * The severest justice may not always be the best policy.

     * No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent.

     * It was in the oath I took that I would, to the best of my ability, 
preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. I could not 
take the office without taking the oath. Nor was it my view that I might take an 
oath to get power, and break the oath in using the power.

     * 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 are 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.

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     * These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert to fleece the 
people, and now that they have got into a quarrel with themselves, we are called 
upon to appropriate the people's money to settle the quarrel.

     * Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit 
of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is 
the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has 
its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights. Nor is it 
denied that there is, and probably always will be, a relation between labor and 
capital producing mutual benefits.

     * The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the 
American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; 
but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word 
liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product 
of his labor; while with others, the same word many mean for some men to do as 
they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor. Here are two, 
not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name — liberty. 
And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by 
two different and incompatible names — liberty and tyranny.

     * We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best, hope of earth.

     * We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have 
been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in 
numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have 
forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, 
and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in 
the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some 
superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we 
have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and 
preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us!

     * This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit 
it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise 
their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to 
dismember or overthrow it.

     * Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of 
the people? Is there any better or equal hope in the world?

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