As a people we listen to news outlets not for information but for ammunition.
We have degenerated to a state of endemic name-calling, of assuming the world will end If The Other Crowd Gets Eelected. Nothing, it seems, can shake our faith in bumper-sticker political discourse. We face real problems that are shunted off into a siding, presumably because it’s more important to blame instead of solve. We’d see this vast communal behavioral pattern as silly [which it is] if it weren’t so tragic. In short, none of us seems to put any real value on reconciliation.
On the other hand, nobody was as passionate about reconciliation as Lincoln, and in the world he lived in passionate hatred spilled over into a war producing more casualties than all the other conflicts this country has been involved in, from the Revolution to Iraq and Afghanistan.
We may not value reconciliation, but Lincoln did.
At one point he was visiting the sick and wounded, and came on a tent filled with Confederate wounded – the enemy. Shot-torn in both hips lay Henry L. Benbow, a colonel om the 23rd South Carolina artillary, and according to Colonel Benbow, “the President halted beside my bed and held out his hand. I was lying on my back, my hands folded across my breast.
“Looking him in the face I said, ‘Mr. President, do you know who it is to whom you offer your hand?’
“‘I do not,’ he replied.
“I said, ‘You offer it to a Confederate colonel who has fought you as hard as he could for four years!’
“‘Well,’ said he, ‘I hope a Confederate colonel will not refuse me his hand.’
“‘No sir,’ I replied, ‘I will not,’ and I clasped his hand in both of mine.”
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