Everyone should already be familiar with The Gettysburg Address and have a basic understanding of the context in which it was crafted and delivered. I don’t think there is much I could have to add to that understanding, but I submit that the basic message of the address is still applicable today and that with a bit of rewriting it would be perpetually relevant to any free society. Here is what it could say to anyone at any time in any country where the government recognizes that it truly does derive its just powers from the consent of the people:
Our fathers brought forth a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great struggle, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. The brave men and women, living and dead, who have struggled for the liberty we have now have given us a consecrated history which we must never forget. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they have thus far advanced. It is for us to be ever dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave so much — that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall never perish from the earth.
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