Sorry it’s been so long since I’ve edited this…
http://wedeclare.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/the-united-states-constitution.pdf
Gay…Marriage? Is THAT what we think this is about?
PRESS RELEASE: Gay…Marriage? Is THAT what we think this is about?
Andrew Horning, Candidate for Indiana US Senate
May 15, 2012
Freedom, IN: Like all things political, the “gay marriage” issue has become far more battle cry and “litmus test” than sane discussion.
What we call gay marriage is not (I repeat, NOT) about a church recognized covenant between a man, a woman, and God. No, the church gave that unto Caesar a long time ago. That’s why the minister says, “…by the power vested in me by the State of…”
Marriage, my fellow Americans, is politics.
Now, marriage is about Social Security, bereavement pay, visitation rights, property rights, work rules, tax rules, and more rules, rules rules from the Great Caesar’s Golden Calf. Marriage is legal, contractual, corporate, political privilege, rights, guardianship and healthcare.
So, those who now want to claim the moral high ground on traditional marriage have wallowed into the preposterous role of promoting disparity in matters of simple justice.
I propose we get politics entirely out of marriage. From the Christian perspective, we should take from Caesar what is God’s. From the secular perspective, we should make policy and law that does not involve sorting, allocating and denying rights based upon abstract and arbitrary political categories.
Not only is this the moral thing to do, it is also the Law of the Land. Our constitutions were written in large part to prevent politicians from granting “to any citizen, or class of citizens, privileges or immunities, which, upon the same terms, shall not equally belong to all citizens.” (Indiana Constitution Article I Section 23)
That is what I’m putting on the ballot – rules that are few enough to know, simple enough to understand, and important enough that they’re to apply equally…to all.
This is all written down in the annotated Indiana and US Constitutions at http://horningforsenate.com. These precious, workable laws will be on the US Senate ballot exclusively under the name, Andrew Horning (L).
###
Looking for a few good voters
I plan to place a series of large-format ads in the Indianapolis Star and a few other key newspapers around the state (donations made out to Horning For Senate, if you’re so inclined). It will be a simple ad, with a simple logo, maybe a picture of me, some contact information, and something like this:
Looking for a few good voters
If you think this nation can keep going the same direction we’re going, then, please, read no further and have a nice day.
If, however, you’re concerned about our future, then please, read on. We may need you.
OK, the bad news is that we have nobody but ourselves to blame for the cronyism, the violence, the injustice and self-destruction of our culture. We The People have exactly and only what We The People have chosen with our wallets, our actions, our voices (and/or silence) and our votes. We certainly cannot blame the politicians and political abstractions we’ve chosen over and over again. They’re just doing what comes natural, what they can get away with, and what we ask them to do.
The good news, however, is that We The People can have exactly and only what We The People choose. We don’t have to turn to anybody else to fix our problems. It is not too late to clean up our messes and choose the life we want to live. It’s never too late; and there is currently no need for a “revolution” anywhere but in our own minds and voting arms.
Of course, the bad news with that is that we don’t get what we want, we get only what we choose…and we’ve felt as though there are no choices but that two-headed crony network we call the “two party system.” We have been betrayed and deceived. It’s understandable that your trust in any politician, even ones you’ve never given a chance, is very low.
Then again, the good news with that is that there never really has been a “two party system;” that’s just an abstraction of some pretty bad choices on our part. We can fix that with just a little information.
Alright, so the bad news is that most people can’t even imagine how this country could work better. Trained in government schools and suckled on government handouts, surrounded by government actions and always aware of our wars, nobody alive remembers how life worked before we had all the “programs,” taxation, regulation and litigation that are now sucking us dry. Nobody alive remembers how “national security” worked before we began endless games of international “whack a mole” with our children’s lives. Nobody alive can remember how we could have schools, roads, jobs or healthcare without giving everything unto our new Caesars. We are all caught in the monkey traps of Social Security, Medicare, “national security,” “education” and “welfare.”
Ahh, but there is more good news. The good news that outweighs all the bad is that it’d take only a little more than a third of Hoosier voters to set this nation to a better direction, a proven direction. It’d take only slightly more than a third to crack the cronies’ pedestals and govern our government by rules that are few enough that everyone can know them; simple enough that everyone can understand them; and important enough that every single one of them is to be obeyed by everyone (even the rich and mighty) equally, without exception, all the time.
And my fellow Hoosiers, those rules exist; they are proven to work better than anything else humans have ever tried; and they are already the Law of The Land. They can be ours again as soon as we choose them.
This is not fantasy. The fantasy, though a very bad one, is what we’ve been doing. The dreamers are those who think we even can preserve the authoritarian, lawless status quo. The fools are those who keep voting for it.
We all make decisions every day that impact our families, our careers, our children’s future. I’m asking only that you give more thought to your vote than you have ever dedicated to it before. I’m asking that you read your state and federal constitutions to see what you have been missing, how you have been misled, and how you can fix it all on Election Day.
We can fix this country. We can live in peace, prosperity, security and freedom if only we choose to. That choice will be at least in part represented as Andrew Horning (L) for US Senate. But the choice is yours.
It’s All In Your Head. Fix it.
Admit it; our “national debt” and maddening political complexity is all totally incomprehensible.
Whether it’s trillions or squillions of dollars; or the unknowable mysticism of bureaucracies, “laws,” lawyers and courts; doesn’t matter, because neither you nor I can fathom the width and breadth of such vast enormity. We can’t figure out our own taxes, let alone the monstrosity that churns behind those taxes…
The real issue I want to highlight is not the vast, complex debt and politics (because neither of us could handle that); it’s what such incomprehensible hugeness does to our will.
Have you ever felt so far behind at school that you “got sick” and just stayed home?
Have you ever felt so far behind at work that you felt like getting a new job and a fresh start?
Have you ever gotten so far behind in bill payments that you felt like just chucking it all and becoming another bloke on the dole?
Has your wife ever gone to Maryland last Monday, leaving you to do dishes and clothes, feeding animals, collecting eggs and shutting in the chickens every night all on your own, and you got so far behind that you felt like running away to Mexico before she gets back the weekend after next?
No, of course you haven’t. Neither have I. Certainly not. I don’t even know how I could have imagined such scenarios. But judging by our collective votes, most of our neighbors feel like what I’d described above, all the time.
Because what I see in our words, our daily actions, and of course our votes, is a complete loss of will to do anything about Our Big Mess. It’s just too much. Too unknowable. Too untouchably distant from our capacity to respond. In a state of rationalized stupefaction, we have decided that there is just nothing we can do.
Sure, we mutter a few political incantations to ward off the evil spirits (something like, “it’s those Democrats/Republicans;” or “it’s those evil unions/corporations”), and thus remove ourselves from any accountability for it. We may even go to a Tea Party or “Occupy” event and hold up a sign saying something really, really angry.
But we are merely throwing our words at an abstraction of a great vacuous phantom. A few of us may try to find a visible symbol for it; like a rich politician, or an agency, or a large building. But we never imagine that there is a much more human, personal scale to this problem of ungovernable, untouchable, unstoppable debt and politics.
Well I say that there is no such thing as the monster we have created. I’m herewith claiming that there are, in all of human society, and through all of our history, just three significant things:
1. People
2. Actions
3. Consequences
In fact, consequences are mostly abstract, but they can be so significant as to compel actions. And it is that interface where we get into trouble, in my opinion.
The national debt is composed almost entirely of unconstitutional and therefore illegal contracts; and of course nearly all of our politics is illegal. Our problems are illegal, immoral, and to repeat, they are only abstractions. These abstract consequences of people acting badly are not physical things; they are all in our heads; they’re a choice…at least until they compel into bloodshed in war, theft and other violence. The actions we’ve been taking based upon these abstract consequences are just as illegal and immoral as were the original actions themselves. You shouldn’t keep this concatenation of one evil upon another going. You can stop it anytime you choose to. You should choose to very, very soon. Just as with the previous so far behind scenarios, you can choose to catch up to your work, just as you can choose to restore a relationship gone sour …or choose to simply live as you wish to live and thus make American Life sweet – better than ever, if you want that.
Liberty, security, prosperity…you can choose these instead of choosing the mess we’ve created and cannot bear to behold. I say it’s time to stop voting for and choosing politics, and start voting for and actively choosing life as you wish to live it.
OK, so maybe the preceding was too abstract. Maybe I’ve not made my point plainly enough.
How about this: You (over 95% of you, anyway) always vote for a single, two-faced crony network, just as most of us have done for a hundred years now. There is one group of bankster/moneychangers behind both marketing groups we call “the Two Party System,” and they are who you’ve been voting for.
Forget “liberal” and “conservative” ideology, whatever that may be today. Forget whatever you think the constitutions say (most still haven’t read any constitution, state or federal). Forget the fact that this next election “is the most important, and perhaps the last election ever!” just as every election has always been. Forget that “we must get rid of <so and so whoever> at all costs!” as usual.
The real problem is you, your choices, and the consequence of those choices. Fix you, and the government that reflects you will look a whole lot better. Get your mojo together. Clean up your mess.
Our politicians are not the problem. We voted for them. “The system” isn’t the problem, since we keep voting for that too. We The People have exactly and only what We The People have freely chosen.
That is our problem, and we can fix it.
Calling all Antiestablishmentarianists!
If you’ve been looking for a wholesome, constructive way to thumb your nose at the entrenched, corrupt, violent and stupid “Two Party System,” I’ve a suggestion…
Join my campaign team for US Senate!
This will be a practically zero-dollar campaign that I mean to run with mostly newbies. I’m looking for people who love life …and mistrust politics enough to track it down, beat it down with a club and keep it hungry on a short leash.
I plan to fill all key positions in the next month or so. I’ll need people to update lists, blast emails, coordinate volunteers, make movies, chalk sidewalks, perform street art, and so on.
…They must be kidding me
I wasn’t going to blog about such things. I really do mean to focus on my primary objective and avoid wasting time on anything else.
However, just moments ago I just opened the Final Order/assessment of a $503.68 “civil” penalty to the Horning for Governor campaign for what was, perhaps, the all-time most trivial offense against Indiana Election Commission paperwork.
We failed to properly close-out our meagerly funded campaign and report the money we didn’t make by their deadline. That’s it.
But the whopping fine, amounting to a huge percentage of what my campaign raised, is not what I’m writing about.
And no, it’s not that I’m miffed that Obama or Charlie White got away with much more serious violations of campaign and civil law, while a poor schlemazel like me has to cough up the dough.
(though, in case you’re wondering, I am miffed about all that).
No, I’m really writing about the two (2) quarter-sheet notices slipped into the envelope.
The two sheets were identical, and said,
ATTENTION
The styrofoam cube enclosed in this envelope is being included by the sender to meet a United States Postal Service regulation. This regulation requires the letter or package to be ¾ of an inch thick at its thickest point. The cube has no other purpose and may be disposed of upon opening this correspondence.
For any further questions or comments about the styrofoam cube only, please call 1-888-624-5990.
Now, there is so much wrong with this, that I hardly know where to start. Forget that StyrofoamTM is a trademark of the Dow Chemical Company and should …by law, be so noted. Forget that the enclosed bit was not a cube at all (it was supposed to be a parallelepiped, but it was smashed into a rhombus). I don’t care so much about clumsy or incorrect grammar and such (“is being included,” or “disposed of upon opening”). And I’m assuming I was given two notices by mistake (may I never find out that this is another regulation!)
No, this is just one of those freakishly weird regulations that none of us could possibly know about unless we’re in the business of sending dangerously, criminally thin packages. I see this as analogous to having to duck under a sign that says “WARNING, Low Sign / ¡ADVERTENCIA, Señal de baja! placed in accordance with the Officious, Unnecessary and Badly-Worded Signage Act of 2010”
I’m quite tempted to call that 888 number and… No, strike that. I don’t even want to know how many people staff that line at taxpayer expense. I think I’ll just slip the “cube” and the little sheets into the documents I’m mailing to the Governor (http://wedeclare.wordpress.com/2011/03/01/713/). Maybe he’ll be amused. Maybe the package will look suspicious and get “special attention.”
Sigh…
We must oppose this unregulated regulation/lawless lawmaking madness with all our wits and might; and we must not waste any more time in this important endeavor.
Do you really want to live like this?
According to our Declaration of Independence, governments derive “…their just powers from the consent of the governed.” But as demonstrated in the Middle East today, all government powers, just or unjust, are by consent of the governed; and that consent can be withdrawn from even the most oppressive dictators.
So the problem with despotism is never really the despot. The problem is that for every despot there is a majority of citizens who empowered that despot. Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Caligula and countless others didn’t kill hundreds of millions by themselves, you know. Do not fool yourself; people like Kim Jong Il, Charles Taylor, Hirohito, Mugabe, Quadhafi, Nebuchadnezzar II, Nero or even Vlad the Impaler are everywhere and always among us. They are nobody special by themselves.
Here in the USA, we can conveniently, painlessly choose how we are to live. Deny it or not, we have exactly what the majority of us have freely chosen. We may say we want change, but we vote for mostly elites and incumbents. We may say we don’t like the corruption and money in politics, but less than 10% of us ever vote for anything else. Many dictators of the past century, including Benito Mussolini, were elected by people just like us.
So consider what we’ve chosen. We’ve not had even a year’s peace since the War to End All Wars. The Home of The Brave has sacrificed freedom for empty promises of security. The Land of The Free has the world’s highest percentage of citizens in prison. We really do tax people out of their homes to pay for homelessness programs; and we tax, regulate and litigate away businesses to stimulate the economy. We guard borders everywhere in the world except at home. For the first time ever, we’re working longer hours, taking fewer vacations, spending less time with our kids, and living more poorly than the previous generation. The rules we must live by are unknowable and ever-changing – law has now become little more than incantations, as high priests of law in grand courts decree, apparently on whim, how things are to be.
Are you happy with this? Is this how you want to live?
Humans can learn. When we want something, we know all about our choices of color, flavor, engine size, craftsmanship, price or caliber. We spend crazy amounts of time on sports, or romance novels. I know people who can tell you the vertical jump height of their favorite basketball stars, or can detail Oprah’s diet ups and downs.
But by what I’ve personally seen in tens of thousands of average voters, We The People apparently don’t care about the injustice and madness we’ve chosen to make of our lives. We know less about those we’ve chosen to lord over us than we know about movie stars. We certainly don’t know anything about our state and federal constitutions.
Despite what we may say, our votes say that we want unaccountable people of status and money to tell us what to do. Our behavior in the voting booth is beckoning a dictator. I believe we’re going to get one soon.
May I make a request? I’d like for you to read your state and federal constitutions and see what we’ve thrown away…and could have back anytime we choose. They are still law, though we act otherwise. They would still work better than anything else ever tried, if we’d only try them.
If you’ve taken the hour or so it takes to read the federal constitution, you already know that federal government should be invisible to almost all of us almost all the time. The Indiana constitution is the contract most relevant to Hoosier life. It’s a longer read, but still not terribly long or complicated. Both comprise rules of life that are few enough to know, simple enough to understand, and important enough that everybody should obey them without exception, all the time. The free life these contracts describe is simpler, safer, and in every way better than the politicized lives we’re living now.
You can read these constitutions (with my annotations)here:
http://wedeclare.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/the-united-states-constitution.pdf
http://wedeclare.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/indiana-constitution-book.pdf
Please ask other people to read them too. If you know somebody who wants to read them, and has no internet access, and you’re too cheap to print them out yourself, then contact me at thefreedomfarm@gmail.com, and I’ll get you copies.
Yes; it’s that important to me. I have to live here too…
We never asked…
I intend to deliver the following to the Governor’s Office with a press conference at noon on July 4 on the east steps of the statehouse.
I believe this is the the most appropriate date (and a date upon which I’d staged yearly protests until 2008). I think it’s the most appropriate place to start for this Step One (a polite request to the correct officer).
I hope a good number of people, including you, can show up to join me:
Dear Governor Daniels,
We have read our state and federal constitutions. We understand their purpose and legal authority. And now we both understand, and suffer, the breadth and depth of our society’s transgressions against these fundamental laws.
These transgressions have occurred by public choice, and progressively over many generations, so we did not see the damage we were doing. But we do see that damage now.
It would be both tedious and unnecessary to detail the errors and resultant harm done, or to list our many reasons for wanting the illegality to end.
We will supply at least a partial list of serious grievances and injuries if that would help you remedy the breach of social contract that caused them. But our requested remedy is both simple and proven to work better for liberty, security, prosperity and justice than anything else yet tried in the history of human governance:
We ask only that you execute Rule of Law under existing Indiana and federal constitutions, exactly as these laws are written.
Governor Daniels, we want these laws to be enforced without exception, all the time, as soon as possible. They are few enough that everyone can know them; simple enough that everyone can understand them; and important enough that everyone, particularly agents and officers of government, should obey them all without exception, proviso or privileged classes, all of the time.
The laws leave no room for selective enforcement, or preferential treatment by corporate abstraction, class or process. All citizens are to be equal under the laws, and no person is above the laws. No legitimate political authority exists outside of that granted by the plain sense of our constitutions. All governing agencies, actions and rules that exist outside constitutional limitations are, by the clear words and purpose of the constitutions, null and void.
If any part of a constitution is so unclear as to prohibit enforcement, there is a constitutional process for clarifying it in print. But we herewith submit annotated copies of each constitution on the expectation that you will see little that is vague or open-ended in either contract. These annotated constitutions are also freely available online at:
http://wedeclare.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/the-united-states-constitution.pdf
http://wedeclare.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/indiana-constitution-book.pdf
We understand that as seriously as we have failed over the generations, it will take some time to restore legitimate authority to our civil government, and peel back the false accountabilities and destructive dependencies accumulated over generations. We propose that five years is more than sufficient to phase out all illegal political entities, processes, rules, precedents, actions and taxes; and to enact amendments and phase-out plans necessary to ensure full constitutional obedience.
Yet current budget and social conditions demand all possible speed, and history demonstrates an invariable and harsh penalty for delay. Please do immediately employ the legal and political authority that is yours, to restore what is, by law, ours.
Thank you
Here are a few specific conclusions drawn from a simple reading of the constitutions, and requiring immediate action:
- Precedents, in courts or in policy, are not law; nor are “Executive Orders” law. Only the legislative branch can write laws, and then only in the domain authorized. Courts may not write laws, bureaucracies may not write laws, and executives may not write laws. Therefore, all such illegal “laws,” regulations, orders, rules and mandates are null and void. They must be declared so, and denied enforcement, as quickly as possible.
- Baseless currency is illegal. Mandated, monopoly currency issued by unconstitutional transnational private banks, is illegal. Therefore, we ask for a restoration of specie payments and gold and silver-based currency as quickly as possible.
- It makes no sense, nor is it constitutionally permissible, to tax private property owners for our Common Schools. We certainly don’t need taxation to facilitate the current wide and deep discrepancies between rich and poor, and it is illegal. We ask for the restoration of a constitutional Common School fund as quickly as possible.
- There can be no serious doubt about what a Common School system actually is. No other education system is in the authorized domain of state or federal government. We ask for the end of any political involvement in education outside of what’s authorized as a legitimate Common School system; or at least amend the constitution to describe new limits.
The following are additional thoughts for our consideration only:
Note: In case you’re wondering why I don’t address our Governor as “The Honorable;” titles like “The Honorable” or “Esquire” are specifically unconstitutional…and for good reason.
Note: some media folk (particularly the Indianapolis Star) will do their level best to cubbyhole you to something easily dismissed. Resist their attempts to brand us “Tea Party,” “anti-government,” “anti-union” or anything else in the news. Stay on subject. Do not allow them to draw you into another subject that they’ll quickly apply to all of us.
Please: Anything you say outside of Rule of Law under existing constitutions, as written, will ruinously derail our message. DO NOT BRING UP ANYTHING ELSE. No gay marriage, war, tax…anything but ROL under existing constitutions, as written.
Please: Dress nicely, and come neatly groomed. Be as pleasant and yet firm, as possible. This would not be a good time for joking around or bringing/wearing props. This is serious; we must be serious, solid citizens.
DO NOT FORGET: We are the pro government people. We want to govern our government, restore legality to our lawmakers and justice to our judiciary. We are the ones who are legitimate, correct, and on the legal side of the law.
PLEASE NOTE: This is more of a mea culpa than a protest. We The People have what We The People have chosen repeatedly through the past hundred years. We must admit the error of our ways, and choose better. We have no cause for anger…not yet.
Extra Special Double-Note: I repeat: we have gotten into our mess because nearly everybody has chosen it, progressively, and over generations. Most people still cannot imagine what kind of trouble we’re in. If they could, they would not believe that they’re to blame. Remember, we’re not asking so much of our politicians as we are of We The People. We’re asking voters/citizens to change themselves. It is a big enough task to get people of extraordinary political understanding to join us… let us try to show patient understanding to those who still just don’t get it.
PS: I wrote that last note largely to me.
Here’s the key thing:
Tell everyone you know to check out the letter to our Governor, send it to their state legislators, and ask them to add their in-person support to our little endeavor.
Liberty or Bust!
Andy Horning
Freedom, IN
Andy’s Annotated US Constitution
With all the disinformation and historical revisionism buzzing like flies on politics (even with the “Tea Party” as much as anywhere else), I just had to present what I believe to be the facts.
So here’s an annotated USA constitution again: http://wedeclare.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/the-united-states-constitution.pdf
Thanksgiving, by The Book
A shorter version of this went out through Indiana Policy Review this past week…
Given its place in American history, it’s embarrassing how we’ve perverted our Thanksgiving Day. Most Americans nurture a vague fiction involving buckled shoes and blunderbusses, in which Pilgrims and Native Americans joined in a sort of agricultural group-hug. Others, with just enough facts to be dangerous and a hard Democratic Party bias, claim that The Mayflower Compact created a successful government that we’d now call “communist.”
More correct, but still oversimplified into the GOP counterargument, is that this communism was so disastrous that the few survivors were forced into free market economics, which became The American Way (i.e., all that is just and wholesome).
William Bradford’s own words have been used to support this. In his first-hand account, “Of Plymouth Plantation,” Bradford detailed their commune’s declining initiative, morality and crop yield, then summed up the failure of communism as:
“…the vanity of that conceit of Plato’s and other ancients applauded by some of later times; and that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God.” (emphasis added for reason that follows)
It’s fine to say that what we now call “communism,” or its authoritarian cousin, “socialism,” is both ancient, and proven unworkable. But Thanksgiving was never about sound economics, filled bellies or kumbaya fellowship. The Thanksgiving of 1621 was neither America’s first; nor the beginning of our national November holiday.
Our national Thanksgiving Day holiday was established in the midst of our civil war as a penitent prayer and statement of political deference…to God. Lincoln’s proclamation, written by Secretary of State William Seward, acknowledged the surprising strength of the nation in the midst of war, and the unexpected foreign neutrality at the depths of our weakness, and said, “They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.”
Seward wrote the proclamation because just a few days before, Lincoln himself was not a Christian. “But when I went to Gettysburg and saw the graves of thousands of our soldiers, I then and there consecrated myself to Christ.”
Congress made the holiday permanent in the hot midst of WWII; perhaps the last US assembly with anything like, in the words of Seward, “…humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience.”
Where are the politicians today who’d acknowledge their sin and turn praise away from their works and toward the Almighty? These days, even Christians erect a wall between their faith and their government; though the Bible deals very harshly with that Golden Calf we call politics.
Despite the modern, shallow interpretation of, “Then give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s,” the whole Bible says that everything belongs to God, including Caesar. That’s what made Christ’s reply to the Pharisees so piercing.
Psalm 33:12′s, “Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD,” has an unfortunate corollary – Cursed is the nation whose god is politics.
Christians should have learned this already; if not from our Bibles, then from American history. And if not from our history, then from current events.
Have we forgotten that faith in the Republican’s “Contract with America” was followed by more unfounded faith in the Democrat’s “Hope and Change?” Now we’ve switched tribes and shamans again for the “Pledge to America;” but nothing has changed. We certainly don’t Pledge our Allegiance to God… Our national religion is still all about robbing Peter to pay Paul, where we pray to lawyers, lobbyists and politicians in a never-ending hope to be Paul, while somebody else, for at least a while, must be Peter.
This Thanksgiving why not choose a way of life that is simple, Biblical, constitutional and proven to work? Such a way exists, it’s already the law, and it could be yours for the asking…if you know Who to ask.
After all, politics is a junkyard dog, not an angel. “In God We Trust” means that In Politics We Must Never Trust. And Thanksgiving Day means, in the words of Seward, to “…fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation.”
Amen to that.
