Change Agent - Blogabond

“Be the change you want to see in the world.” Mahatma Gandhi

The Lincoln monument is among my favorites here, a strangely reassuring figure commemorating an assassination perhaps, an emancipation certainly, a man and an ideal most of all.

Lincoln Memorial

I went to a hypnotist years and years ago, when I had still not passed the oral component of my California state architectural exam after three tries, and when she asked me to imagine two things that would help me pass the exam, one image that came to me was my grandfather on my father's side with his hand on my shoulder. The feeling of that, of comfort and security and strength, was exactly what hit me as Mia and I walked the steps of the Lincoln Memorial late at night, all kinds of people gathered here unexpectedly at such a late hour, the darkness framing our approach and focusing our attention on the brightly lit figure inside, Lincoln imagined by Daniel Chester French in the early years of the twentieth century. That 28 blocks of carved stone should elicit such emotion, that is a remarkable achievement.

"IN THIS TEMPLE, AS IN THE HEARTS OF THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM HE SAVED THE UNION, THE MEMORY OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN IS ENSHRINED FOREVER".

Lincoln Memorial

"Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on 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." Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address

The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. 100 years later from these steps:

"Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon of light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of captivity....."

....."I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character...."

"....When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village, every hamlet, from every state, and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing the words of the old Negro spiritual,....Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

My thanks to http://www.epinions.com/content_118944272004 for the facts.

written by

roel krabbendam on July 24, 2007 from Washington, United States

from the travel blog: Spare Change

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