What If The Gettysburg Address Was Given In Buzz-Speak

lincoln-gettysburg-address-speech-analysisI think the Gettysburg Address is a brilliant speech – no arguments there. In fact, over 200 years later, it still invokes President Lincoln’s passion.

But what if it were given today? I started thinking about his eloquent words and how the speech would sound if corporate buzzwords replaced his words.  So here it is, my buzzword version.

Fourscore and seven years ago our “stakeholders” brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the “value proposition” that all men are created on a “net net basis.”

Now we are “operating in the space” of a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can “add value” while “moving forward.” “The game changer” came we are met on a great battlefield 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 what it is” that we should do this.

But, in a “10,000 foot view”, we cannot dedicate-we cannot consecrate-we cannot 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 “big picture” will little note, nor long “mis-remember” what we say here, but it can never “literally” forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be “robust while moving forward” here to the unfinished “new paradigm” work which “pushed the envelope” they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. “At the end of the day” it is rather for us to be here “content” to the great task remaining before us-that from these honored dead we take “win-win” to that cause for which they gave “110%” of the last full measure of devotion-that we here “pro-actively” resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain-that this nation, under God, shall see “the glass as half full” and have a new “out-of-the-box” freedom-and that “intellectual capital” of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.