During my entire time I practiced medicine it was the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) that gathered and organized this data. The expertise for getting this data gathering done properly resides with the CDC. Improvement in the quality of data gathering and reporting is welcome in scientific endeavors, but the Trump administration laid no groundwork for a wholesale shifting of data reporting from the CDC to a different agency, a move which smells of political motivation to control the narrative by controlling the data.
Is there reason to be suspicious? In any other administration a major shift in the handling of data would have been preceded by a detailed explanation of the need and logic for making the shift. No such explanation preceded this move. Instead, we see an administration at war with medical expertise at the CDC on the wearing of masks, a President saying we should just quit testing for Covid-19, and Peter Navarro, Trump’s Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, penning an op ed criticizing Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of National Institutes of Health, and questioning Fauci’s pandemic expertise. Dr. Fauci, a highly respected figure and part of the Coronavirus Task Force, hasn’t had an audience with Trump in two months. We see an administration at war with medical expertise.
On the flip side we have Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson (and the right wing internet news site of which he is the co-founder, The Daily Caller), and parts of social media downplaying the seriousness of the pandemic, lobbying hard in their news silo for Americans to ignore scientific advice.
At the very least, this move to abruptly shift the handling of data on the pandemic reveals once again a highly dysfunctional administration, an administration unable to lay the groundwork necessary to build trust in its decisions. At worst this move is a thinly disguised attempt to control and massage data to suit the narrative Trump wants to sell. In short, a step toward telling us to “reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.”
Heather Cox Richardson in her July 15 email Letters from an American tackles the same subject from a slightly different angle. I encourage you not only to read her analysis but sign up for her daily email. Her email is the first national news analysis I read every day. She is a Professor of History and Boston College specializing in American history. I find her perspective extremely valuable.
Keep to the high ground, Jerry
P.S. This data shift of the Trump administration angers and frightens me in the same way that reports of the early Trump administration efforts to defund the gathering of climate data and remove all references to climate change at government websites–another example of ideology suppressing scientific expertise.
Washington State Primary Election ballots going into the mail July 15-17. That’s today through Friday. In order to be counted ballots must be mailed back (postmarked) or dropped into a Ballot Drop Box by 8PM Tuesday, August 4th. Be a voter and an influencer. Do your homework early. Talk with people about the choices you’ve made and why you made them. Encourage discussion and participation.
Click myvote.wa.gov. There, by entering your name and birthday, you have access to the ballot you will see when it arrives in the mail, the names of your current incumbent elected officials, your own history of voting (that you voted, NOT for whom you voted), links to candidate statements, and much more.
If you, like I, find the candidate statements in the Voters’ Guide rather bland and nonspecific, check out FUSE Washington’s progressivevotersguide.org. I find their endorsements detailed, rational, and convincing.
For candidates at the state level you can determine who is funding there candidacy by visiting the Washington State Public Disclosure Commission website: https://www.pdc.wa.gov/ Navigation on that site takes some learning, but there is a lot of interesting information. For example, one can quickly see that only six of the thirty-six candidates for Washington State governor have significant financial backing: https://www.pdc.wa.gov/browse/campaign-explorer.
This is the process of democracy in our current system Ballot turn-in numbers are typically much lower in primary elections than in the November general elections. Motivated, organized primary voters might put two candidates on the November ballot both of whom are unpalatable, because much of the potential electorate sits out the primary. Don’t let that happen. Do your homework, do it early. (Aside:Ranked Choice Voting in a combined election could eliminate this problem. Stay tuned next year for a chance to advance this idea.)
Look for your ballot in the mail. It you haven’t received it by early next week, first check your registration and the address at which you’re registered at myvote.wa.gov. If you are still puzzled, contact the Spokane County Elections Office (or your county’s elections office) by email or phone. Here’s the link to those numbers and emails for Spokane County: https://www.spokanecounty.org/Directory.aspx?did=10
Do your homework! And
Keep to the high ground, Jerry
Some Election Orientation (much of which I did not know until about four years ago): Other states hold their primary elections at different times. That can be confusing. Idaho held their primary May 19, a full eleven weeks before Washington’s primary. (And, of course, the Presidential Primary elections and caucuses have already come and gone.)
In even numbered years like 2020 the primary (non-presidential) election offers a sometimes bewildering array of candidates for U.S. Congressional, statewide, state legislative, and county positions. (This year in Washington State, for example, we have a record thirty-five candidates running for governor against the incumbent, Governor Jay Inslee.) In Washington State elections of local officials, mayors, city council members, school board members and other are held in the odd numbered years.
Last Friday a Spokesman article by Chad Sokol announced: “Kevin Morrison resigns from board of Spokane Public Schools.” There was a time when most readers would have skimmed such an article and moved on, but, considering that the Spokesman and The Inlander covered the story from different slants, it seems that more context is warranted.
Some background: The Board of the Spokane Public Schools (SPS) consists of five members, three of whom were newly elected to their positions in the general election in November, 2019, just eight months ago. Kevin Morrison defeated Erin Georgen to serve for six years as a SPS Board Member. Mr. Morrison ran on his sixteen years experience in the administration of the Spokane Public Schools, experience most voters assumed would be useful for the function and continuity of the Board. Prior experience at SPS might be useful currently as the Board and SPS face multiple challenges: crafting plans for reopening the public schools this fall in the midst of the pandemic, the likely budget crunch related to the issue, plus the recent resignation of the Superintendent of SPS, Shelley Redinger, to lead the Richland Washington School District.
Spokane Public Schools (in numbers of students) is the second largest school district in the State of Washington, after Seattle. SPS is roughly on par with Tacoma. Spokane Public Schools has an annual budget of nearly a half a billion dollars, 93% of which comes from Washington State coffers, only 7% from school levies. (For more background see The Board of Spokane Public Schools I wrote last fall.)
Serving on the Board of the Spokane Public Schools is an unpaid position. These people serve on the SPS Board as volunteers, volunteers who put themselves through the rigors of a political campaign and then devote tens of hours each week for six years to the job. Their work is mostly performed in relative obscurity, obscurity punctuated by attacks from small groups of media savvy citizens wanting to spotlight issues like sex education, vaccination requirements, and the arming of school security personnel.
Mr. Morrison resigned from the SPS Board due to “unforeseen personal matters” according to the Chad Sokol of the Spokesman, “personal reasons” according to Wilson Criscione of the Inlander. The “personal matters” remain obscure in both news sources and, reportedly, to the other members of the Board as well. Mr. Morrison is mum, leaving readers to wonder. The articles could have ended there, but, instead, each news writer heads off on a different tack–and that’s where it gets interesting.
In the Spokesman Mr. Sokol goes on to discuss Mr. Morrison’s misgivings about the SPS Board’s speedy decision to appoint an SPS insider, Adam Swinyard, the associate superintendent, to replace Shelley Redlinger as head of Spokane Public Schools. Note, however, Mr. Morrison voted AYE to the appoint Mr. Swinyard, along with rest of the Board. Sokol’s coverage doesn’t read as a reason to resign but as a needless parting potshot at the function of the Board.
Mr. Criscione in the Inlander article (no paywall), who was unable to interview Mr. Morrison, never mentions Mr. Morrison’s supposed misgivings about the process of replacing Ms. Redlinger. Instead, Mr. Criscione leans hard on a petition that began to circulate a month ago on Change.org (following the George Floyd murder) initiated by a local parent, Ileia Perry, calling for Morrison’s resignation. The petition references emails Mr. Morrison wrote while serving as interim Safety Director of SPS. Those emails were written months before Mr. Morrison was elected to the SPS Board. In that correspondence Mr. Morrison expressed support for a resource officer at Ferris High School, Shawn Audie, who had been videoed by students pinning a black student to the floor with his knee on the student’s neck. Mr. Morrison may not have known at the time of writing the emails that the resource officer, Mr. Audie, had a string of accusations of use of excessive force, including force that lead to the death of man, before Mr. Audie came on as a resource officer at Ferris.
Did Mr. Morrison resign on account of the petition demanding his resignation? Further down in Mr. Sokol’s Spokesman (not the Inlander) article we read, “Asked Thursday whether the petition had anything to do with his decision to step down, Morrison said, ‘Emphatically, no. It had nothing to do with that.’”
These two news articles, set side by side, leave us wondering. Both are “factual” reporting, not “opinion,” but the difference in slant is glaring. The pair of them leave me with many peculiar musings news coverage, propaganda, human communication, elections, and the actual challenges of civil governance.
Keep to the high ground, Jerry
P.S. In the Spokesman article Morrison is also quoted with this snippy remark concerning the rapid replacement of Redlinger by Swinyard as Superintendent: “I think that the board is going to be best served at this time by someone who is maybe a complete outsider, and doesn’t come with preconceived experience or necessarily knowledge of how systems and process works, because that seems to fit the current board style and management.” Does this sound like a man who is resigning for “unforeseen personal matters”?
Sneezing, coughing, singing, talking, breathing. Which spreads Covid-19? Probably all of them. Sneezing and coughing should be obvious to everyone. Official guidance about “covering your cough” has been consistent since the beginning of the pandemic. It seems obvious (at least to most people) that a mask helps reduce the droplet ejection from coughing and sneezing, but a mask doesn’t catch it all.
Beyond coughing and sneezing the scientific data is less clear, but it’s gradually coming into focus. Proof does not come easily. In contrast to the scientific method of controlled experimentation taught in high school, it is not ethical to do the obvious experiments with Covid-19 using human subjects. The potential consequences, death or lifelong disability, are too dire for the participants. Furthermore, any direct experiment would need to consider a lot of variables. For example, there are likely individual differences among infected people in how much virus they exhale–and certainly there are differences in immune resistance among those exposed. On account of those variations a definitive experiment would require hundreds of participants. Not practical or ethical.
We are left with inductive reasoning. Scientists study respiratory droplets and aerosols, the distances over which they spread, and the likely virus load (dose) they contain. They link that data with the results of what we might call “natural experiments,” the careful study and reconstruction of events recognized to have spread the disease (that’s the realm of epidemiology and contact tracing). All of that data is pooled, discussed, and hashed out to produce the best recommendations possible based on what we know at the time. But here’s the thing: People like easy-to-remember absolutes while the best science can offer is an assessment of the probability of transmission.
Stand cross-wise to the sun’s rays. Talk for a while. You may notice the occasional tiny speck of light traveling away from your mouth. Those are droplets. Everyone produces some of them. Most of them land on the ground within 3 feet (1m) and an even higher percentage hit the ground within 6 feet. “Droplets” include particles down to 5 micrometers (5 one thousandths of a millimeter. A 5 micron droplet is not visible.) Hence the recommendation we’ve heard in this country since the beginning: 6 feet social distancing. Six feet does not ensure perfect protection, but a compromise between risk and workability. As you can see from the two demonstrations below, masks help against droplet spread–a lot.
So for droplets, six feet is good and a mask definitely helps, but what about aerosols, specifically, bio-aerosols, fine particles emitted when someone breathes, particles that remain suspended in the air? What’s the risk and what might this risk mean for indoor gatherings?
The Skagit Chorale incident in March was an early cautionary tale, a “natural experiment”, we all should heed. Sixty-one singers practiced indoors (with no masks) for 2.5 hours, Fifty-three participants tested positive or were deemed positive by symptoms for Covid-19 within a couple of weeks, three were hospitalized–and two died. There was some moving around during the practice and distancing was not consistent (both facts cloud the conclusions a bit), but the attack rate strongly implies that forceful singing in an indoor environment produces aerosols that travel or linger in the air and are infectious beyond six feet. (Think singing hymns in church.)
In February and March in the U.S., the early part of the Covid-19 pandemic, mask wear was not encouraged for the general public. We later learned this was thanks to the Trump administration’s denial of disease and its flat-footedness in encouraging a ramp up of mask production. There was fear that an early broad recommendation for mask wear would result in a run on masks that would leave hospital staff without protection in the face of intense exposure to the disease. (I have not read an estimate of how much spread occurred and how many people died as result of lack of an early mask wear recommendation, but in those days of e.) Mask wearing for the general public was first recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) way back in early April. Leadership in encouraging this clear recommendation could have saved lives.
To anyone paying attention to the science it has been clear for months: Wear a mask! This a predominantly respiratory disease. It is primarily spread by respiration. Any mask is better than no mask.(Except those that have a bypass that exhausts your breath without filtration. Such masks don’t protect others from you–a bypass subverts the primary purpose of a mask.)
Some people, most notably our science-denier in chief, are painfully rigid, congenitally unwilling to admit they were wrong. Mr. Trump can afford to not wear a mask while telling his followers that wearing one is optional. He, after all, has everyone who enters his presence at the White House tested for Covid-19. His daughter-in-law, who tested positive, is sent away for fear of infecting him. Meanwhile, he conducts rallies with hundreds or thousands of mask-less followers, united in their denial and exposure.
If we all wore masks indoors (when in contact with people outside our pod) and outdoors in crowds or anywhere outdoors where social distancing cannot be maintained (these are the current Washington State regulations), we might regain the control of viral spread. We might get back to something close to normal sooner. But, alas, we lack intelligent leadership at the top.
Being indoors with people from outside your “Covid pod” carries risk. Bars, crowded restaurants, dance venues, especially without masks, tend to spread the virus, probably by aerosols, probably well beyond 6 feet. Air conditioning systems, heating systems, and reduced circulation of clean outside air all likely contribute to the risk. Take advantage of nice outdoor weather. Socially distanced gatherings outdoors are likely the next safest thing to being isolated. As high or low temperatures tempt us to socialize indoors, staying healthy will be more of a challenge. Winter is going to be tough.
Keep to the high ground, Jerry
A few related thoughts and observations:
Mask use:
The use of masks in east and southeast asia is well accepted as a necessary public health measure at the first hint of respiratory disease spread. Mask use is at least part of the reason many countries in that region have been able to tamp down viral spread far better than we. We would do well to learn from the rest of world.
Indoor v. outdoor air:
Measles virus, said to be the most infectious of human pathogens, can remain infectious hanging in indoor air for up to two hours.
In the recent past people were more attuned to the risks of indoor airborne spread of disease, even if the details were unclear or even mistaken. The word malaria, for instance, simply means “bad air” (in Medieval Italian). The disease was associated with the bad air of swamps and marshes. It wasn’t until the early 1900s that it became clear that a mosquito vector was to blame for transmission, not just “bad air,”–but the name stuck. One wonders how many people contracted malaria because they left their windows open to mosquitos trying to avoid the “bad air”.
Perched on top of a cliff overlooking Spokane Valley from the north, the Royal Riblet Estate‘s Cliff House, built in 1925, nods to the cult of fresh air. Four bedrooms occupy four corners of the structure, allowing for cross ventilation while sleeping.
My parents (of the same vintage as the Cliff House) always left bedroom windows partly open for fresh air even in the depths of Wisconsin winters.
When I was in medical training in Boston in the late 1970s the remnants of the mechanisms used to open the ceiling louvers in several of the ground floor open wards of the old Peter Bent Brigham Hospital were still visible. Decades before these had been the wards in which patients suffering from tuberculosis were housed. Such wards were constructed in the belief (quite probably correct) that fresh air was good for TB sufferers (and perhaps that fresh air also reduced the spread of the disease). Tuberculosis, once endemic to European and U.S. populations, is now treated and fairly well controlled with antibiotics. However, it remains endemic in much of the world.
I watched Hamilton. There is much in the story, the presentation, cast, and the foreign background, upbringing, and education of the man himself that bears on the present day. (See the P.S. for how to watch)
I listened to parts of Trump’s nasty, divisive speech at Mt. Rushmore last Friday fanning the flames of the Republican culture wars of grievance, ignorantly casting the attacks on the statues of Confederates as “lying about our history” –as if those statues were not themselves a lie. (I recommend this 7 minute explanatory youtube video: How Southern socialites rewrote Civil War history. And this tidbit entitled James Longstreet Statues?.)
On the same day as Trump’s speech, July 3, the Spokesman reported in a tiny article that vandals had defaced the George Floyd mural recently painted by Daniel Lopez on the side of the Shacktown Community Cycle building at 2nd and Howard downtown. (Sadly, the vandals were not caught on video because of a corrupted hard drive.) Racism is alive and well in the inland northwest. Why no more notice than this of a defacement of a modern historic symbol–the mural?
The Republican Party as it is constituted today, is dependent on racism and our racist past for the minority support that keeps it in power. Recognize here, once again, that the Republican Party of today is not the party of Lincoln. Democrats and Republicans have switched roles since Lincoln. The current Republican Party is dependent on the votes of racists who were gradually cemented to modern Republicanism by the “Southern Strategy.” These are people whose views on slavery would have been anathema to Lincoln. Smooth rhetoric gives non-racist Republicans plausible deniability of the party’s racist vote dependence, but the party strategy is plain: use racism as a wedge; stoke racist fears and harvest the votes. [For local connection, remember that Cecily Wright once was chairwoman of the Spokane County Republicans even as she and her husband, at their Northwest Grassroots gathering, hosted white supremacist Charlottesville marcher, James Allsup, speaking on “label lynching.”] Today’s Republicans stoke racist fears using, among other things, unattributed videos like one sent to me (and “undisclosed recipients”) via email over the weekend by a friend I thought was a moderate Republican. Called the “Nigger Video,” it features a black man talking head who starts by saying “Obama shouldn’t try to ban guns, he should ban niggers,” and follows with pseudo-statistics superimposed on a background of rioting. No documentation, no sources, no timeline, no attribution, a video whose only intent is to inflame.
To quote Kevin Phillips, former Republican strategist, writing in the 1960s:
Those who don’t know history are condemned to repeat it. A lot of U.S. history has been intentionally obscured. I only recently learned of the Tulsa Race Massacre, but until just a few days ago I was unaware of the Wilmington, North Carolina, 1898 insurrection, an event, as this excellent youtube video further explains, was intentionally hidden by local librarians. This is history pertinent to the present day. Unlike my friends video is well referenced. It is there for the searching. Learn it.
P.S. Hamilton became watchable, streamable, on July 3 on DisneyPlus.com which you can join for a month for about $7 (and then cancel if you don’t want yet another monthly fee nibbling at your credit card). I’m sure the live performance is a different experience, but seeing a live performance is an expensive expedition and, right now, with Covid-19, not even possible.
On July 3rd, The New York Times reported several polls suggesting that “Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History.” Four reputable polling organizations found that between 6 and 10 percent of population of the U.S. may have participated, that’s between 15 million and 26 million people. People turned out all over the country from May 26th to the end June in response to the video of the appalling behavior of Minneapolis police officers as Officer Derek Chauvin knelt on the neck of George Floyd for nearly 8 minutes, a video recorded and posted by a high school junior still too young to vote. The video ignited worldwide protests, focusing a bright spotlight on the racism and oppression still coursing in the veins of this country one hundred and fifty-five years after the end of the Civil War, racism and oppression perpetuated and molded by textbooks and statues meant to rewrite history–and paper over the still festering wound of racism and slavery. I’m a little ashamed now that In my youth in Wisconsin I lived part of that mythic re-write as a participant in Civil War centennial re-enactments that ignored the slavery over which the Civil War was fought.
Between six and ten percent of the population participated in Black Lives Matter movement. A review of international protests suggests a “3.5 percent rule,” suggesting that, if 3.5 percent of the population participates, change will ensue (specifically, governments facing that level of protest will fall). Click that link to read the detail, and the caveats. Among the caveats is this important one [the bold is mine]:
The 3.5% figure is a descriptive statistic based on a sample of historical movements. It is not necessarily a prescriptive one, and no one can see the future.
There are countervailing racist, anti-inclusive forces at work that wish to quash the intent of the Black Lives Matter movement. None is so clear as the divisive “they’re trying to re-write history” speech Mr. Trump gave last Friday, July 3, at Mt. Rushmore in which he effectively endorsed the Lost Cause narrative, itself a racist re-write of history.
So how do we get from the six to ten percent Black Lives Matter movement to real change? We pay persistent attention like we have not paid attention for a long time–and that starts locally.
Last Monday, June 29th, for the very first time, I watched the Spokane City Council meeting from one end to the other online on “Channel 5” (not including the “briefing session” that preceded it). Here’s where the rubber begins to contact the road. I hope the same thing is happening in City Councils all over this country. The main issue on June 29th in Spokane was whether or not to approve a Police Guild (union) contract that continues to subvert a city-initiative-passed ordinance in favor of civilian oversight of the Spokane Police. It was rejected on a seven to zero vote. A striking point made during the meeting was several Council members saying they had never before experienced this level of engagement with their constituents in the days leading up to the meeting. They got the message.
So. Case closed, right? NO. It is not closed, not yet. As I pointed out, rejecting the proposed Police Guild contract is just the beginning, setting a complicated course of arbitration and/or wrangling between the Guild and our Guild-supported Mayor Woodward, a wrangling that level the Council largely out of the picture. This is not a long term solution and we dare not lose track of it.
The fundamental issue here is this: the Guild should NOT be allowed to negotiate their own oversight as part of their contract–and especially not to negotiate with a mayor they helped elect.The City Council cannot fix this–a fact that had escaped me. The fix lies in a change in Washington State law, the RCW (the “Revised Code of Washington“), likely a change in a clause buried in Chapter 41.12 Civil Service for City Police, that would take oversight out of contract negotiations.
So how do we make that happen? We email our support for such a change to our Washington State legislators, not only Senator Andy Billig and Reps. Marcus Riccelli and Timm Ormsby of Legislative District 3, but also those of Legislative Districts 4 and 6 with which the City of Spokane geographically overlaps.
Perhaps more importantly, with elections coming up in November we can work to replace LD4 and LD6 legislators with people like Lori Feagan, Lance Gurel, and John Roskelley in LD4 and Zack Zappone and Tom McGarry in LD6. Check them out, talk them up with friends and neighbors, and contribute to their campaigns. None of the seated legislators (all right wing Republicans) in LDs 4 and 6 seems to be interested or even to understand the issues. (see P.S. below).
Elections and communication with those elected are where the rubber meets the road on pursuing the positive change encouraged by the Black Lives Matter movement. Don’t let this movement peter out in haze of detail of governmence. Let’s keep at it.
Keep to the high ground, Jerry
P.S. For an example of obfuscation by current local Republican state legislators on the Black Lives Matter / Police reform movement listen to Mike Padden’s interview on the KPBX website. He rambles, touching on body cams, the chokehold (which he is against), the “lateral vascular neck restraint,” i.e. compression of the carotids, as opposed to the airway (which he favors), and the appeals process that he things get some police re-instated when they shouldn’t be. He made no mention of the essential issue of the law enforcement unions negotiating their own oversight. Senator Padden (LD4) is opposed by John Roskelley, former county commissioner. It’s time for a change.
I offer this for those who are not already signed up for Letters from an American. Heather Cox Richardson occupies the high ground. Have the best Fourth you can in these trying times.
And on July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, declaring: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
For all the fact that the congressmen got around the sticky little problem of black and Indian slavery by defining “men” as “white men,” and for all that it never crossed their mind that women might also have rights, the Declaration of Independence was an astonishingly radical document. In a world that had been dominated by a small class of rich men for so long that most people simply accepted that they should be forever tied to their status at birth, a group of upstart legislators on the edge of a wilderness continent declared that no man was born better than any other.
America was founded on the radical idea that all men are created equal.
What the founders declared self-evident was not so clear eighty-seven years later, when southern white men went to war to reshape America into a nation in which African Americans, Indians, Chinese, and Irish were locked into a lower status than whites. In that era, equality had become a “proposition,” rather than “self-evident.” “Four score and seven years ago,” Abraham Lincoln reminded Americans, “our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” In 1863, Lincoln explained, the Civil War was “testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
It did, of course. The Confederate rebellion failed. The United States endured, and Americans began to expand the idea that all men are created equal to include men of color, and eventually to include women.
But just as in the 1850s, we are now, once again, facing a rebellion against our founding principle, as a few wealthy men seek to reshape America into a nation in which certain people are better than others.
The men who signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776 pledged their “Lives, [their] Fortunes and [their] sacred Honor” to defend the idea of human equality. Ever since then, Americans have sacrificed their own fortunes, honor, and even their lives, for that principle. Lincoln reminded Civil War Americans of those sacrifices when he urged the people of his era to “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.”