Ken Burns

That's Abraham Lincoln.

He would come the closest to overseeing our near national suicide in the Civil War.

But he understood here you got these two magnificent oceans, big, relatively benign neighbors north and south.

And so what we've been able to do is incubate.

So many extraordinary things.

But we've also been able to incubate lots of less than extraordinary things.

And he was saying it's those less than extraordinary things are going to trip us up or we'll live forever.

Because if you think about it.

the greatest naval invasion in history, you know, June 6, 1944, D-Day, Normandy.

Nobody can do that for us.

Nobody's going to land at Montauk.

Nobody's going to land at, you know, St.

Augustine.

Nobody's going to land at Galveston.

And help us, right?

We'll sink or swim by the extent to which we are knowledgeable of and adhere to the blessings that we've received from that founding generation, the sacrifice made not by those boldface names.

but by the people that you've never heard of, that we are trying to tell you about, John Greenwood, the 14-year-old Pfeiffer, Joseph Plum Martin, the 15-year-old kid from Connecticut, Betsy Ambler, you know, loyalists, too.

I mean, we're umpires, Joe.

We call balls and strikes, you know?

Being a loyalist in the revolution is what it would be like saying, well, you're conservative, right?