Four-score and sixty-seven years ago, I was watching a dreadful performance of Our American Cousin, wishing I were dead. I hate the theater.
And then a funny thing happened.
I can’t help but wonder if I might have survived that night if my government had free health care, a more reasonable policy of gun control, a mastery of the apology, or even a national hockey program to help the North and South settle their differences on the ice.
It has been two centuries and some change since our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men—and eventually women—are created equal. But now we are engaged in a great uncivil war that threatens to test whether that nation, so far removed from the founding principles upon which it was conceived and dedicated, can long endure.
I believed in my lifetime that the cure to a divided America rested in the hands of the North. Today our solution lies just a bit farther, in the hands of the good people who occupy the true North, strong and free. Within these pages lies the blueprint for our future, a nation returned to the principles of liberty and equality, plus some stuff about hockey. Perhaps if we had this book in my lifetime, I should not have perished from this earth.
Abraham Lincoln
Penny Aficionado, Sixteenth President of the United States