I offer words of two previous presidents that are relevant to the many crises we face today as a nation.
In his second inaugural address at the end of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln spoke about coming together as citizens to help and support one another:
“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive… to bind up the nation’s wounds,… to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
In 1940 when the nation was still struggling with the Great Depression and watching Europe dissolve into war, Franklin Roosevelt spoke about the importance of respecting and celebrating our ethnic and religious differences as symbols of this nation’s strength:
“We are a nation of many nationalities, many races, many religions-bound together by a single unity, the unity of freedom and equality. Whoever seeks to set one nationality against another, seeks to degrade all nationalities. Whoever seeks to set one race against another seeks to enslave all races. Whoever seeks to set one religion against another, seeks to destroy all religion.”
In these difficult times, we need a president who shuns cheap demagoguery and trite divisiveness. We need a president who can speak with similar clarity and compassion as Lincoln and FDR, who can rise above meanness and blind partisanship, who can remind us as Lincoln did that “we are not enemies, but friends” who are touched by the “better angels of our nature.”