Trip to D.C.: Day One

I have to be in Washington, D.C. for three days this week on business, so I thought I would use this blog to post updates. Normally, my routine is just that - a routine - so this trip is a change of pace. I find it fun to travel, but also exhausting... and not nearly as good as it could be, since I'm sans Melinda.

When I got checked into my hotel room, I headed back toward the city and spent a bit of time walking around the National Mall. The weather forecast calls for rain the next two days, so I figured I might as well see what I could see, even though it was nighttime and a bit drizzly. In the Lincoln Memorial, I read Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address. Quite a statement, I must say.

While I was reading the speech, a woman - probably in her late twenties - came up to me and asked, "What is this thing?" I told her it was Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, written during the Civil War. "There was a war going on?" She asked. I pointed to the last section, where it reads:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

"Isn't that amazing?" I asked. "Even at the height of the civil war, Lincoln was already expressing grace and kindness to people who would count themselves his enemies." I love that Lincoln made no distinction between the widows and orphans of the North and those of the South. All are to be cared for. The woman who had approached me said, "Shoot. That's crazy... That speech is like only ten minutes long," and walked away. I'm not sure she got it.

Lincoln rocks.