Driving to campus each morning, my route takes me past the spot where Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address, dedicating the cemetery in which Union war dead are buried.
My mind inevitably is on other things — the lecture I am about to give, student papers I am grading, or the shopping list my wife texted me — but all of that stops for a moment when I reach the peach orchard where Pickett charged and my thoughts turn to profound questions of sacrifice, service and liberty.