Mountains Made Low

That’s what I’m missing.

From MilkandCookies.com.

Yep. Must find a cool product.

A while ago, I wrote about the Microsoft ad featuring a “real person” named Lauren. If you remember, Lauren was on a mission to purchase a new notebook computer with a 17″ screen, for under $1000. She ended up picking one that met these two requirements (no mention of her choice’s other specs, though we were led — likely misled — to believe that it was pretty tricked out in terms of RAM and hard drive capacity, too).

Anyway, Apple fired back. With their Web ad entitled “elimination,” in which a computer shopper names the features she wants in her computer, and the helpful (you really do feel bad for him, sometimes) PC helps her to select the right PC for her, finally conceding to the Mac, “She’s all yours.”

Here’s “Elimination”:

No major Independence Day series this year. Just one quick post with some thoughts.

Seven score and six years ago today, the dust was settling on the bombed and burned and bloodied fields surrounding a small town in southern Pennsylvania. The battle was over, but the war was far from it. A civil war, it seems to me, is often the least civil of wars — if, indeed, any war can be called civil, or can be said to be waged for the cause of civilization. And on July 4, 1863, at Gettysburg, the battle was over, but the war was not; the fighting was over, but the dying was not. The men who had taken up arms to defend what they perceived as liberty under different star-spangled banners of red, white, and blue would continue to bring their bullets and bayonets to bear on their countrymen — others who cherished the cause of freedom, others who called themselves Americans, others who often discovered that they had far more in common with this enemy than they could ever have imagined — for another two years to come.

Later that year, in November, a leader would survey the field of that battle, which had likely already begun to heal, and he would soberly and somberly reflect on what had happened there, what was still happening in the nation he loved. This man, whom history has come to consider great, that day spoke of his own smallness, his own lack of ability to add much of anything to the consecration those men had brought to that place four months earlier. The battlefield stood, already, in his mind as monument and memorial to the love and spirit of those men, those American men, who stood, who fought, who bled, and who died for liberty, under those all-too-similar flags, whether they wore blue or gray. The ground was hallowed by the blood of American patriots in a way much more real — and much more visceral — than any words from any president could ever cause it to be.

This leader realized this. So at the dedication of part of this field of battle as a cemetery and memorial to these fallen Americans, he said little. But the words he said still have power. And they still remind us today of our responsibility to those who have gone before us and shed their blood to provide us with the freedoms we now enjoy. I’ll close here, with those words:

Four score and seven years ago, our forefathers 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 battlefield 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 cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot 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.

President Lincoln was wrong about one thing: The world has much noted and long remembered his words that day. But along with remembering them, let us also remember Lincoln’s call to his fellow Americans and to us down through the nearly century and a half that has passed since those words were spoken.