Isn’t it amazing to predict and wonder about the behaviour and attitude of our idols in this era? Their opinion is what we seek to get the right direction for the plethora of dilemmas we all are encountering with. Election Day is here, marking the end of what Politico called “the dirtiest presidential race since ’72.” To ease the tension of the big day, the students of Northeastern University asked their faculty members to participate in a quirky thought experiment that challenged each of them to consider how one well-known but long-dead person, Abraham Lincoln, one of the best in his respective field would have voted in the 2016 presidential election of Donald Trump versus Hilary Clinton. The response was undoubtedly insightful, sobering, and occasionally hilarious.
Having spent his entire life in politics trying to preserve the Union, it became Abraham Lincoln’s, the 16th president of the United States, sad fate to preside over the most destructive war in American history. Yet, amid that war, he remained optimistic and positive about the future of the Republic. In his annual message to Congress, on Dec. 1, 1862, he wrote that the American Republic was “the last best hope of Earth.” To succeed, the nation needed to follow a path “plain, generous, and just.”
Towards the end of the war, he repeated this message in his second inaugural address, on March 4, 1865. Bill Fowler, the Distinguished Professor of History at Northeastern University while expressing his thoughts quoted, “With malice towards none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, and do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” Lincoln certainly would not have voted for Donald Trump.
Harminder Singh