200 years later, we're looking for Lincoln, liberty

We as a nation have just observed the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln with a few parades but with a lot of nostalgia. We had better remember the 16th president because he is needed today more than ever. We seek his stature, we hunger for his wit, and we desperately crave his wisdom.

As part of this yearning we have a new president from the race that benefited directly from Father Abraham. He is an attorney from the Plains, shorter than Abe, but he towered in his own debates. He speaks like one who knows words as did Lincoln, but is this new leader the new emancipator? We and the world are watching and hoping.

America today is not free. Ownership of another human being is against the amended Constitution, but there are still slaves and slavery.

Is not our individual and national debt a form of ownership by another? This time the chains are gone, but we are slaves nonetheless. This time who is the master and who is the slave is not determined by color, while sadly skin tone still matters. Instead there is a new pervasive kind of slavery that affects both white and black. This time living up in the big house is a sordid assortment of owners, including every petty dictator of countries that have the fortune of being on top of oil reserves, and nations that have a huge servile work force that is barely paid above slave wages. The collaborating taskmasters are the mismanaged agencies or executives who were supposed to be working for us. It is also different now that we were not dragged from our villages and forced to labor. We walked into the shopping malls or the inflated houses of our own free will and chose to sign the X. This time it is a not civil war between North and South but between who is our Master or our Visa.

We are trapped by the slavery of self-indulgence. We are a nation of free people, but with that precious freedom too many of us have become dragged down with our excessive wants and covetings. Buying more than we can afford, and blaming others seems to be order of the day — no, of decades. In the process there has been a shift of wealth from the many to the few. With this growing income gap between the top 1 percent and the rest of us there is a growing mastery of one over another. When we champion political and economic policies that increases the divide between the rich and the poor, is that what the rail-splitter would want?

Now we are embarking on a great national experiment. Can we spend ourselves out of the crisis? If we do nothing, they say all is lost. But if we do no more than command dollars to march into the fusillade without correcting the underlying felonious assumptions and attitudes and political self-interest, we will bury our money and our children's along with our mutual future.