Forty years ago this week, I was at Disneyland, on a senior trip with my church youth group. Away from school and parents, young and carefree, we laughed and ran and juggled for our places in the lines, chattering as we hurried from one wild ride to another.
Gradually, we caught enough snatches of the conversation flowing around us to realize that momentous things were transpiring, out in the wider world. For one thing, a new president was being inaugurated.
It would be a while before my age group realized what a remarkable thing the coming of Ronald Reagan was. Certainly, he was in no position to compete, just then, with the food and the flirting and the prospect of another turn on Splash Mountain.
Word was also drifting around that afternoon of something else: the release, at last, by Iranian militants, of the 52 Americans they’d been holding prisoner for the last 444 days.
It’s hard to explain now – to those who’ve come since – what the sudden taking and long holding of those hostages meant to America at the end of the 1970s. What a humiliating thing it was to be helpless before those defiant religious extremists.
Our president faltering – his would-be rescue mission a deadly, chaotic shambles – the TV news filled every night with gloating young Iranians spitting insults and wagging their fists in the face of our impotence.
All of it blending with looming images of the Ayatollah Khomeini, sneering out from his black robes at “the Great Satan” of America, urging on the militants and looking to many Western eyes like a Middle-Eastern Darth Vader … his soulless eyes the harbinger of so many awful things to come.
Word of the freed hostages added that much more cheer to our already happy day, but my peers and I weren’t really musing on geopolitical breakthroughs as our wandering lark in the park brought us, at last, to Main Street, USA, and a presentation billed as “Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln.”
I begged my friends to dally for the show. Wasn’t sure what it was, but ‘ve always loved history and felt sure ole Abe was worthy of a few moments, at least, of our time. They indulged me.
What we saw was an animatronic personification of the Great Emancipator, sharing a few thoughts against a darkening sky on a screen where the reddening sunset and streaming white clouds gradually deepened into an American flag, stretching across the heavens.
It was a beautifully rendered scene, and his was a deeply moving speech. Nevertheless, I was startled, as Mr. Lincoln sat down in the shadows and the themes of The Battle Hymn Of The Republic filled the room, to find people all around me leaping to their feet, tears streaming down their faces.
“We’re clapping for a robot,” some part of my mind pointed out, even as I joined in the applause.
But, of course, we weren’t.
We were cheering – in a moment of deep relief, renewed hope, and deep love for our country – the words of a man whose life and spirit embodied so much of what we cherish most about our native land. He spoke with his unique, plain-spoken eloquence of all that was in our nation’s soul, that crowded day.
His subject was the end of America. A subject that, four decades later, on the eve of another inauguration, is on my mind in a way it was not that happy afternoon at Disneyland, when I and my country were young.
“At what point shall we expect the approach of danger?” Lincoln asked. “By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some trans-Atlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never!
“At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected?
“I answer, that if it ever reach us, it must spring from amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we ourselves must be the authors and finishers. As a nation of free men, we must live through all times, or die by suicide.”
What course, then, for those disinclined to self-destruction?
“Let us strive to deserve, as far as mortals may, the continued care of Divine Providence, trusting that … He will not fail to provide us the instruments of safety and security.
“Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us nor frightened from it by [the] menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.”
Forty years later, my duty, as I understand it …
“As Christ died to make men holy, let us live to make men free.
Our God is marching on.”
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