Feb
Presidents Day shopping
Seattle Times staff columnist
Presidents Day resonates more this year than usual.
It’s still a day off to shop for bargains, but circumstances give us more to think about.
George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, the two presidents who decorate the sale ads, presided over two crucial periods in our history.
Without their leadership, this would be a different country — if it existed at all.
We are going through some heavy times ourselves. The country is always in transition, but this feels like one of those times when peril and possibility are deepest.
We are at war, the economy is tanking, the international order is changing, and we are experiencing a historic campaign for the office once held by Lincoln and Washington.
The young nation coalesced around Washington’s leadership. Lincoln had the difficult task of keeping that nation from tearing itself apart.
At the Museum of History & Industry in Seattle, there is a timely exhibit on Lincoln and the Civil War that serves as a reminder that this country is an ongoing project.
Near the entry, the exhibit notes that Washington’s generation left some issues unaddressed in order to pull the states together.
Was this one nation, or a confederacy of sovereign and separate states?
Can you believe all men are created equal and yet hold people in slavery?
Those questions festered until they burst.
What a time to have a president of limited experience, a one-term Illinois congressman.
The way Lincoln rose to the task is not a bad example for a modern president to follow.
At each juncture, he weighed conviction against practical considerations and made the right call for that moment.
When he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, he was blasted by white northerners who said they’d fight to preserve the union, but not to end slavery. And he was denounced by other white northerners who said he’d not gone far enough, since the proclamation only ended slavery in states under rebellion.
Lincoln held to his position.
He worked a miracle in keeping the country together and setting it on a better path, but like Washington, he left much work still to be done.
In his famous speech on the battlefield at Gettysburg, Lincoln said the people gathered for the ceremony couldn’t do more than the soldiers had already done to consecrate that ground.
“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 fitting, especially this year, that Presidents Day is embedded in Black History Month.
The Constitution was amended after the Civil War to give black men the vote, but it took another century for the words to be made reality for African Americans.
Now, an African American and a woman stand a chance of being elected president.
If one of them wins, he or she would have to be much more than a caretaker, and certainly more than a symbol.
Today, we are shopping for a leader who can navigate through peril and make the possible real.
Jerry Large’s column appears Monday and Thursday. Reach him at 206-464-3346 or jlarge@seattletimes.com.
Copyright © 2008 The Seattle Times Company
