With Malice Toward None
“It’s a mess, ain’t it, Sheriff” the deputy said in No Country For Old Men. “If it ain’t, it’ll do ’til the mess shows up” was the reply. We’re in a mess right now, and no mistake. It’s the biggest mess most of us have ever seen and ever will see, though there have been others in our country’s history.
On this Wednesday, April 15, it will be one hundred fifty five years since Abraham Lincoln was murdered. Six days before that, April 9, 1865, the surrender at Appomattox brought an end to the hostilities of the American Civil War. Nearly as many died in captivity in that conflict as were killed in the whole of the Vietnam War. Hundreds of thousands died of disease. Around two percent of the population, an estimated 620,000, lost their lives in the line of duty. Taken as a percentage of today’s population, the toll would have risen as high as six million citizens.
Anyone can look these dates and statistics up, if they even need to. They are part of our nation’s narrative, as is President Lincoln’s second inaugural address, given on March 4, six weeks before he was gunned down. Yesterday I came face to face with a few lines from the speech, the shortest in history at 703 words.
“With malice toward none,” he said, “with charity for all…to bind up the nation’s wounds…to do all which may achieve a just, and a lasting, peace among ourselves, and with all nations.
It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated to the unfinished work…that this nation…shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth”.
I found myself openly and unexpectedly weeping. I was surprised at my tears because I know the words so well, like most Americans, and have never had that reaction, unlike at the end of Field of Dreams. I hear “Hey, dad, want to have a catch?” and I expect to choke up, every time. I don’t expect that reading Lincoln’s second inaugural. “Oh, yeah, great, cool, got it, thanks, Mr. Lincoln, Wise words, those.”
Why yesterday? Why the tears? It was like pointing the temperature gun at my own forehead every morning these days before I am allowed to work and having someone else witness it. Or how Bob Dylan sang about being given a book of poems by an Italian poet of the fifteenth century.
And every one of them words rang true
And glowed like burning coal
Pouring off of every page.
How far I am, I thought, from “Malice toward none,” how far from “charity for all.” If anyone could read my heart and soul, they’d see. Oh, sure, I write this biweekly blog post, but I still harbor deep resentments and have no tolerance for certain opinions and beliefs. Have I learned nothing?
In my unguarded moments, which I suspect other Americans are also having, I find myself longing for the nation’s wounds to be healed and for that new birth of freedom. Yet, I question my willingness to be dedicated to the unfinished work, as he challenged us. Maybe I don’t have the chops to spin this into gold.
For today, I will take Pema Chodrön’s advice with me. “Compassionate action starts with seeing yourself when you start to make yourself right and when you start to make yourself wrong. At that point you could just contemplate the fact that there is a larger alternative to either of those, a more tender, shaky kind of place where you could live.”
