With a Federal Election awkwardly loping up to us here in Australia, like some giant malformed directionless jellyfish, my frustration at what has been promised in the past and what has actually been delivered to us is causing a lot of us here in Canberra to question where public life is going.
Abraham Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg address of only 272 words in 1863 after a Civil War schism that defined Americas' position in history. It called for a road forward that would reunite that country.
Here is my revision (humbly) submitted to the blogosphere ;-)
er, see ya at half past...
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Well more than the four score and seven of Lincoln's time has past. On reflection, it seems to us today that the plans of our forefathers have become a corrupted shadow of their original noble dreams.
Surely they had no plans for the wide-spread human rights abuses and corporate corruption in a world that now values possession over humility, self-promotion over selflessness and expediency over honour.
Nor would our forefathers have planned to bring our fragile world to the brink of extinction by producing weapons with the capability to destroy our planet many times over.
These are not the dreams of our forefathers but the nightmares of tomorrow being peddled by the soulless puppets of greed that claim to represent us.
So we have the world as it is today.
We must now ask what is the great task remaining before us?
The peaceful life-affirming tenets of the world’s great religions and progressive philosophical thought must be promoted to starve the light from those who twist the symbols of peace and unity to promote fracture.
Government must realize that they are still of the people; their responsibilities to the people never diminishes.
Corporations must use their knowledge and potential to create the life we aspire to, without destroying the foundation of that life, our planet.
We, as peoples of the world, must join today and pledge to know and support our neighbours, realize our inter-dependency on each other for our very survival and support this common purpose to keep the world alive, peaceful and free.
Let the hopes and dreams of the many prevail, so that unjust power be rendered to dust.
