It is for us, the living ...

KENNETT, Mo. -- There is a tendency to regard February as merely the second month of a new year, a time to endure the final wrath of wintry snow and freezing temperatures, yet this period provides a far more important moment in America's history that has been slowly diminished by the passage of years.

February marks the birthday anniversaries of perhaps the nation's two greatest leaders: George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Because the latter spoke so often, and so unerringly, of the challenges that would face our nation and its people in the future, it is important to recall some of his words in this time of recovery from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. We can learn much if we will but listen to him and follow his counsel.

As he wisely spoke of the need for America to be "dedicated to the unfinished work that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom," he was also warning those of us today that without such effort, we shall "perish from the earth." Had Lincoln not existed, or had he been less than he was and the battle to keep the nation had been lost, it would have meant the end of the American experiment. Secession would have bred secession, reducing us into smaller and smaller fragments until we were only broken pieces of the dream.

Lincoln saved us from that. But the winning of the most dangerous battle to preserve the founding fathers' goals and aspirations did not preserve us from the need to fight further battles in the struggle to balance our diversity with our harmony, to keep the pieces of the mosaic intact even while making room for new pieces. That work is today, as it was in the 1860s, still an unfinished work ... still a cause that requires "a full measure of devotion."

For nearly 150 years since Lincoln, we have used his words of warning in the struggle to free working people from the oppression of a ruthless economic system that saw women and children worked to death and men born in poverty live in poverty and die in poverty, in spite of working all the time ... in the continuing fight for civil rights, making Lincoln's promise real ... in the effort to keep the farmer alive ... in the ongoing resistance to preserve religious freedom from the arrogance of the zealots and the zealotry of those who would make their religion the state's religion ... in the crusade to make women equal, legally and practically.

Many battles have been won, and the embrace of our unity has been gradually but inexorably expanded.

But Lincoln's work is not done. As a matter of fact, we are still struggling with it today, upon realization that the words of the Declaration of Independence will not, cannot, become reality without great effort and dedication on the part of all of us. Always he searched for ways to bring within the embrace of the new freedoms, the new opportunity for all who had become Americans.

Deeply, reverently, grateful for the opportunity afforded him, he was pained by the idea that it should be denied others. Or limited.

He believed that the human right was more than the right to exist, to live free from oppression.

He believed it included the right to achieve, to thrive. So he reached out for the "penniless beginner."

He thought it was the American promise that every "poor man" should be given his chance.

He saw what others would or could not see: immensity of the ideas of freedom and self-determination that made his young nation such a radically new adventure in government.

His words were plain: "The legitimate object of government is to do for the people what needs to be done, but which they cannot, by individual effort, do at all, or so well, for themselves."

So he offered the "poor" more than freedom and the encouragement of his own good example. He offered them government. Government that would work aggressively to help them find the chance they might not have found alone. He did it by fighting for railroad construction, bridges and other such projects that others decried as excessive government. He gave help for education, help for agriculture, land for the rural family dreaming of a future. And always at the heart of his struggle and his yearning was the passion to make room for the outsider, the insistence upon a commitment to respect the idea of equality by fighting for inclusion.

Thanks to this great, magnificent leader, we created a society as open and free as any on earth. And we did it Lincoln's way -- by founding that society on a belief in the boundless enterprise of the American people. Always, we have expanded the promise. Moving toward Lincoln's challenge "to form a more perfect union," to overcome all that divides us, because we believe that ancient wisdom that Lincoln believed -- "a house divided against itself cannot stand."

In Lincoln's time, one of every seven Americans was a slave. Today, for all our affluence and might, despite what is described as our unbelievable economic prosperity, nearly one in every seven Americans lives in poverty, not in chains -- because Lincoln saved us from that -- but trapped in a cycle of despair that is it own enslavement. One of every two minority children is born poor, many oppressed for a lifetime by inadequate education and the influence of broken families and social disorientation. Our identity is hostage to the grim facts of more than 35 million Americans for whom equality and opportunity are not yet attainable realities, only illusions.

It remains for us, the living, to commit ourselves to preserving Lincoln's hopes, aspirations and confidence in America, because as he told us decades ago, there is no better or equal hope in the world.

Jack Stapleton is the editor of Missouri News and Editorial Service.