Thread by @tinytempest

Twelve score and two 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. This was, of course, total bullshit. #SecondCivilWar #NewGettysburgAddress

Black men, Native men, and other men who were not white protestants from the right parts of Europe were certainly not treated as equals, and that's not even mentioning how women were completely left out of the whole Equality business. #SecondCivilWar #NewGettysburgAddress

Still, as a nation we soldiered on. Bit by bit we got our shit together. Women fought for the right to vote, and won. Black people fought for the right not to be treated as chattel, or second class citizens, and won. #SecondCivilWar #NewGettysburgAddress

Victory after victory we clawed our way to surpassing the limited ideals those white men set down on paper, to becoming the nation that was actually worthy of the admiration we sought from others. #SecondCivilWar #NewGettysburgAddress

We were never perfect, there was never a golden age, but there was momentum. And then, seemingly all the sudden, there wasn't. #SecondCivilWar #NewGettysburgAddress

Now we are engaged in a second great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, so flawed and so bathed in blood, so ignorant of its own history and its lessons, can long endure. #SecondCivilWar #NewGettysburgAddress

We are met on a great battlefield of that war: Twitter. We have come to mock the man that foolishly ignited this new war in an attempt to infuriate his followers, disrupt their rational thinking, and incite them to harm THE OTHER. #SecondCivilWar #NewGettysburgAddress

But, in a larger sense, we can not mock -- we can not deride -- we can not dismiss -- this threat. Brave people, some still living and some not, have struggled here, and should be acknowledged. #SecondCivilWar #NewGettysburgAddress

The world will little note, nor long remember, individual tweets, but we should make it so the world doesn't forget the millions who did not vote for this president, who march, who rally, who keep fighting. Who have always fought. #SecondCivilWar #NewGettysburgAddress

It is for us the living to be dedicated here to the unfinished work of putting an end to these horrors through active engagement, supporting candidates as strong and fierce and noble as @RepMaxineWaters and @Ocasio2018, and voting. #SecondCivilWar #NewGettysburgAddress

It is for us to be here dedicated to deplatforming Nazis, to eliminating white supremacy, to tossing misogyny into the ashheap of history where it belongs, to fighting for clean, drinkable water in Flint, Michigan and everywhere else. #SecondCivilWar #NewGettysburgAddress

It is for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- 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. #SecondCivilWar #NewGettysburgAddress

Addendum: I'd like to thank the folks who filled the #secondcivilwarletters tag yesterday with such hilarious, witty, and often poignant stuff. Y'all inspired the #NewGettysburgAddress.