By Nathan Beacom

Copyright thedispatch

A nation is a little bit like a marriage. Things are bound to get bumpy. There are bound to be fallings out. And yet the act of remembering together can also be an act of reconciliation. Remember who we hoped we would be? Remember what it was that made us love each other? These sentiments are at the heart of Lincoln’s constant insistence that we are not enemies, but friends. The fact that we have a country at all today is in part owing to the extraordinary refusal of Lincoln to take an eye for an eye. In his second inaugural, after a war that had brutalized so much, he refused to cast judgment on his enemies. Acknowledging the sin of slavery, and even his own part in it, he still regarded others with mercy. “Let us judge not, that we not be judged.”