The Deeply Flawed Gettysburg Address

Over a million dead and wounded in the Civil War; approximately 50,000 dead and wounded at Gettysburg.  No trivial matter, but did these Americans die needlessly, in vain?

Lincoln gave this memorable speech in an attempt to honor the dead and to comfort the nation during a time of unspeakable tragedy.  But the even greater tragedy is that these lives should not have even been fighting in a civil war.

Our founding fathers were deeply flawed, ethical cowards.  Instead of conceiving our nation in liberty and justice, they conceived it in ethnocentrism and oppression against Native American and Afro Americans.  Before writing the Constitution, our founding fathers should have ended oppression, released the oppressed, and they could have built a society where there was justice for all, treated all peoples equally.  If they had done the above, there would have been no reason to fight the Civil War.

Another reason the Civil War dead died in vain is though the War ended slavery, it did not prevent future segregation, sharecropping, prison gangs and lynching.  Why?  Because it did not end white superiority, white privilege, the underlying causes.

Lincoln never mentioned either oppression or justice in his eloquent speech.  This nation, under God, cannot have a new birth of freedom without justice.  We cannot have a government of the people, by the people, and for the people without Jubilee justice.  A government by an elite cannot be a just government.  Lincoln and others ignored the Nehemiah five solution---repentance, restitution and repair.