Lorraine over at Fingerlakes Wanderers Blog reminds everyone that today is the anniversary of the Gettysburg Address.

Gettysburg in late April is purple and green, the stone gray of the monuments interspersed along the paved roads that guide the tourists in their cars from blood-soaked field to blood-soaked field. The grass of the killing grounds has an emerald richness to it; blood is a great fertilizer, and the bits of brain, bone, and gore blasted into the earth those three days in early July of 1863 have left behind a tapestry of shades of green.

The Address, written by Lincoln on the back of an envelope on the train to the battlefield, has served ever since as a distillation of the ideas of citizenship and sacrifice for a common good. During a time when a significant slice of the population still suffers from discrimination, old and new, it calls to us to remember that all men are created equal.

Four score 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 battle-field 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 can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not 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.

There won't be any grandiose celebrations today, I'm sure. So raise a glass with friends and family to the better angels of our nature, and the great and enduring legacy of Abraham Lincoln.