shall not perish

Today is the tenth annual International Trans Day of Remembrance.
Yesterday was the one hundred and forty-fifth anniversary of some of the most influential five minutes I know of, five minutes and ten sentences that mattered and continue to matter and, I think, apply on this dark day, as well.
They came from a depressed, disabled person who was probably queer and certainly haunted, looking out over a community in mourning, crushed by loss, divided by rage and blood-grudges and barely holding back from another round of vengeance. They came from a hated, mocked leader who looked out on a people undergoing tumultuous change, some free for the first time in memory, some having to deal with it. They came from bereavement and fear and the understanding that sometimes, there's just nothing you can say that will make it better, make it go away, but there is always--always--the kind of hope that says, what we can do? We can work to keep this from ever happening again. We can't do this loss and these lives honor by anything else: we just need to put our shoulders to the wheel and do the hard work of hope.
I'd change the gendered pronouns, myself, were it my speech, but they were the conventions of the time, and it is not.

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers 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 battle-field 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 can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not 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." --A. Lincoln in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, U.S.A., 19 November, 1863