Jakob Roecker

I think it’s important for this organization to publicly state how grateful we are to the citizens who have given their lives for our liberties. One of the reasons for organizing in this setting is that their deaths on behalf of our freedoms are treated irreverently with marketing research on voting trends, gerrymandering, stupid party rules, and cost analysis voting.  I don’t believe that’s the America our patriots died for, and I don’t believe I’m going to step into the grave without doing something to fix it.

Our rights were granted by God, bought with blood, and preserved with honor.  There is a sacred reverence required when representing your fellow citizens.  That reverence demands the pledge of one’s sacred honor.  Nothing less will suffice.  Nothing less will preserve for our children the nation purchased with so much blood.

On this day I think personally of walking through Arlington to visit the headstone of my grandfather who chose his final resting place to be with those whom he called his brothers.  I think of my name, Jacob Roecker, and how it comes from Jakob Roecker, a German immigrant who served in the Civil War, was wounded at the Battle of Gettysburg, and who I believe may have been in attendance when President Lincoln gave his famous address.  For this day, I will post the entire address on this site.

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.