This was my second year attending the memorial service for veterans here. I plan to make it an every year event. When you are there, it feels right as if this is where you were meant to be at this moment in time paying homage to family who served and people you have never met who put their lives on the line for you. It was a sunny, cool and beautiful day to honor these men and women. Our keynote speaker was our Mayor Jim Gray. Jim spoke about his father who was a PT boat pilot in the Pacific just after WWII. As a young boy, the elder Gray allowed his son to believe he was right there fighting with his father, even though he had yet to be born. These stories gave him great joy as a youngster as he imagined the life his father lead while serving in the Navy. Gray ended his talk by quoting a portion of the Gettysburg Address, which seemed so fitting since my husband and I just returned from visiting the town and battlefield. Here below is the entire text as it appears on a plaque in the cemetery:
"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 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 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."
To all of you who have visited the site and who have had family in conflicts from the Revolutionary War to present times, I salute you and wish you the best of Memorial Days.
Tammi
"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 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 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."
To all of you who have visited the site and who have had family in conflicts from the Revolutionary War to present times, I salute you and wish you the best of Memorial Days.
Tammi
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