Regarding Lincoln

As of late it seems as though I tend to wait to see movies until they are no longer relevant. I mean it seems that since I have started college I either do not see movies at all or I see them the weekend before they go out of theaters. I suppose I am probably a little pop culture challenged, I mean I have yet to see Pitch Perfect. So, on that note, this weekend I went to see Lincoln which was only still playing in one theater in my area. And for all that I have heard about what many consider to be our greatest president and what even more people consider to be the worst time in American history, there was something that struck me that I had never thought of before. We were at war with each other.

We start learning about the civil war when we are in elementary school. We learn about slavery and how the south was for it and the north was not. But I had never really sat and pondered the fact that this was an internal war, literally in the streets of American towns. This was not some far off fight that could be ignored; this was your neighbor fighting against his fellow Americans on the “homeland”. This was a president who was faced with approving military plans that would cost the lives of many of his own people, on both sides. Maybe it is just me but I cannot even imagine that, and I am grateful for that.

It gives me hope because I know that as bad as things are right now, they have been worse before and we are still standing. We talk about wars a lot in America, the war on women, the war on poverty, class warfare, but in reality those disagreements are minor. These disagreements on both social and economic issues that seem so insurmountable are nothing of the sort. Sure people will have to compromise and there will always be people that are unhappy, but we can move past these problems like we have every other problem in our history. But it will take the one thing that was so important during the civil war that we lack now, someone with the courage of Abraham Lincoln. Someone willing to risk everything, move across the aisle and stand for their convictions. So the real question is not can we move past these problems, but who will our Lincoln be?