Figured I take the following off the sidebar, so I figured that I would put it in a post. It's a useful reminder of the sacrifices made by those that have gone before us. Many times I find myself lost in my own little academic world, and it is good to be reminded of what it took to build our nation. Helps me remeber to be grateful.

Lincoln's Gettysburg Address
"Fourscore 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 battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it as a final resting place for those who died here that the nation might live. This we may, in all propriety do. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have hallowed 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 rather for us the living, we here be dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation 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."

President Abraham Lincoln
Address at Gettysburg
Nov. 19, 1863

I replaced it with Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade," which was written as a tribute to the bravery of an English light cavalry brigade durring the Crimean War . I memorized it as a kid, and have always thought it a touching poem. Thanks to the following site for the text of the poem.