Fourth of July Fireworks

The equity markets continued to perform handsomely in the second quarter of 2023.  Companies involved in the digital revolution such as Microsoft, Alphabet, Analog Devices, Lam Research, Broadcom, Skyworks Solutions, and Everspin are leading the charge.  Those companies are among the primary innovators in the field of information technology, and they all happen to be based here in the U.S.A.  What a great country.

Over the Fourth of July holiday, as we enjoy our parades, cook-outs, and fireworks, it is a good time to reflect on what it means to be an American and acknowledge how fortunate we truly are.

Though we have all read them numerous times before and some have even committed them to memory, the beautiful words quoted below, written 160 years ago by a singular American man of great integrity, can still bring a lump to one’s throat.

Four score 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 that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not 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 world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we 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.

-A. Lincoln

1 July 2023