Prairie Home Companion

I enjoy listening to the Prairie Home Companion and the News from Lake Wobegon by Garrison Keillor. In Kansas City, NPR broadcasts it Sunday mornings and evenings and it is a two hour show. It is in the line of an old-time radio show. Many of the stories and characters remind me of the small town where I grew up in western Oklahoma. It is really a "hoot" but you have to listen very closely because there is a lot of subtle, dry humor.

The cast has been on vacation in July so Mr. Keillor has been rebroadcasting some of the story episodes. This week there was a portion from a Memorial Day broadcast that included Lincoln's Gettysburg Address:

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.

I am shocked that the courts and Congress have not tried to rewrite this speech and rid it of "under God." I wonder how many of our representative have read this speech, little less the last line... "government of the people, by the people, for the people" not for the personal and financial benefit of the representatives themselves.

I think it has been a while since anyone in Washington has listened to what the will of the people is!