America 10 score and 33 years later
Hurriyet Daily News with wires
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Excitement is spreading across the United States and the rest of the world, as Barack Obama prepares to be sworn in today as the 44th president of a nation weighed down by a crushing economic recession and two difficult wars.
Record numbers are expected to gather in the U.S. capital to celebrate Obama becoming the nation's first African-American president.
Fresh off a rollicking celebration in the shadow of Abraham Lincoln, the president-elect shaped the final day of his pre-presidential life around another giant figure, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights leader who was assassinated in 1968. Obama took part in a community renovation project yesterday in the Washington, D.C., area to honor King.
Meanwhile, Washington is hosting the inauguration, which draws the curtain on George W. Bush's eight-year reign. But with some 2 million people expected to attend the event along with a veritable "who's who" of Hollywood, sporting heroes and political heavyweights, the tightest security operation ever mounted in the U.S. capital swung into action. Nothing on this scale has been seen since the 1965 inauguration of John F. Kennedy's successor Lyndon Johnson, attended by 1.2 million people.
The run-up to Obama's inauguration, like his election, has been defined by enormous public enthusiasm, carefully choreographed events and a lofty spirit of unity. What awaits Americans, as Obama often reminds, is many months, if not years, of hard work.
"In the course of our history, only a handful of generations have been asked to confront challenges as serious as the ones we face right now. Our nation is at war. Our economy is in crisis. I won't pretend that meeting any one of these challenges will be easy. It will take more than a month or a year, and it will likely take many," Agence France-Presse news agency quoted Obama as saying.
The new president will start tomorrow at Washington's National Cathedral for the National Prayer Service, which dates to George Washington's time. His office said Friday that he and his wife, Michelle, will welcome "hundreds of special guests" on "day one, when we open the doors of the White House to you," according The Associated Press.
Perhaps most importantly, however, will be Obama's plan to fulfill his pledge to assemble the nation's military leaders to take a hard look at starting the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq Ğ six years after outgoing President George W. Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" following the initial U.S. invasion of the Middle East nation.
His first day could be crowded with issues of the Middle East as well and the violent Israeli incursion into the Gaza Strip.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.
The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
The’Gettysburg Address,’ regarded as the most famous speech ever made by a US president, delivered by Abraham Lincoln on Nov. 19, 1863