Houston, we have a problem...Life on Mars looks eerily familiar.

I am officially the world's worst travel writer-any ambition or hopes I had in that direction have now been officially discarded.  After nearly a month I have finally proceeded to the third or fourth day of the trip.  These days consisted of time spent in Springfield, home of Lincoln.  It was marvelous.  Yet, for some reason, I've been having difficulty in collecting my thoughts about this portion of the trip to construct a sufficiently coherent post.  It is not due to a lack of material, most assuredly.  Rather the opposite.  Lincoln is easily the most well-loved president.  Aside from Washington being numero uno, Lincoln is probably the only other president who could be placed in a chronological line-up.  ("Turn to the right!"-sorry, bit of an inside joke.)  What we fail to remember, however, is that he was so 'despised and rejected of men' that his election sparked the flame which became the inferno that devoured our country for four long years.  Four years in which two percent of our population died.  Think about that-two percent.  At Antietam more American lives were lost than in all previous wars combined.  At Cold Harbor 7,000 fell in twenty minutes.  This is sobering by any measures but especially so when you consider the crude weapons still employed.  We were on the brink of collapse and staring into an abyss of such profound darkness that all were shaken in their belief in their homeland and its ability to persevere and continue.  Its very existence was challenged.  I don't think anyone, including Lincoln himself, could have foreseen the hell through which they must pass, individually or collectively, to reach the opposite bank of civil war.  I do believe, though, that there were those, like Lincoln, who did more than simply try to survive.  They attempted to give the suffering meaning.  Ideas and ideals change, nothing in this life can remain stagnant and live, but some ideals become more purified by the suffering of trials.  Lincoln stepped onto the national stage a fairly young man with unproved ideas and convictions.  He left the stage an old man, tired out by proving those ideas and defending those convictions; ideas which had been altered to answer a higher cause and convictions strengthened by immense suffering.  Sometimes our heroes are not necessarily defined by what they achieve as by how they reach those achievements.  Lincoln was despised, mocked and hated in his own day.  He was ridiculed and lampooned, criticized and castigated, yet his conviction in the sanctity of human life and the necessity for unity among men never faltered, even in the face of great personal loss, loneliness and depression.  His talents and ambitions were used in the service of others (an admirable trait in anyone, but more so in a politician).  His kindness, forgiveness and patience were equally matched by his 'malice toward none...charity for all...firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right...' (from his second inaugural address, 1865).  My admiration is not for a president who won a war but for a man who willingly and with great dignity served those he had been called to lead, even at great personal sacrifice.

One of my favorite speeches of Lincoln's was delivered in 1838.  In its opening paragraphs, he describes how those who came before us fought to gain the liberties, freedoms and blessings we later generations were born into.  He then delivers one of my favorite paragraphs-"We, when mounting the stage of existence, found ourselves the legal inheritors of these fundamental blessings.  We toiled not in the acquirement or establishment of them-they are a legacy bequeathed us, by a...departed race of ancestors.  Theirs was the task (and nobly they performed it) to possess themselves, and through themselves, us, of this goodly land; and to uprear upon its hills and its valleys, a political edifice of liberty and equal rights; 'tis ours only, to transmit these, the former, unprofaned by the foot of an invader; the latter, undecayed by the lapse of time and untorn by usurpation, to the latest generation that fate shall permit the world to know.  This task gratitude to our fathers, justice to ourselves, duty to posterity, and love for our species in general, all imperatively require us faithfully to perform."  (I adore that last sentence.)  In my opinion, that is some of the most beautiful writing ever constructed.  It gave me chills the first time I read it.  (In the next paragraph he goes on to say, " How then shall we perform it?-At what point shall we expect the approach of danger?  By what means shall we fortify against it?-Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never!-All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.  At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected?  I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us.  It cannot come from abroad.  If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.  As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide."  The prescience in that statement is a bit chilling, too, isn't it?  Remember, this was 23 years before the outbreak of war.)  Needless to say, I tried to soak in the experience of Springfield through every pore.  I may be accused, and not unjustly, of hero-worship, which is an extremely dangerous thing, but, like all hero-worshippers, I think I am justified in my admiration.
(It was a bit amusing-as we were standing in the lobby of one of the Lincoln Museum's theaters, waiting with the entire middle-school population of the state of Illinois, for a program to begin, I heard one very resigned sounding teacher bellow, "Lincoln, you need to stay with your chaperone!!!"  I just thought it was funny....)  So, here are a few pictures of Lincoln's Springfield.