When will our Nation be reborn? It has been an interesting day to try to be proud of this country.

Our nation is in need of being reborn.  The spirit of '76 is no longer with us.  The fireworks will not do it.  I can't get that feeling back about this country anymore.  I spent the day in the presence of a wonderful group of young people from all over the world.  I am a Lion and we sponsor a Youth Exchange every year at this time.  My wife and I are hosting two wonderful young women, one from Algeria and the other from Croatia.  They have been here for a little over a week.  The District 24D Lions  had a picnic and it was the first time the entire group of students were together in one place.  It was refreshing to see this miniature United Nations having fun together.  By the way, did you know that The  Lions Clubs International are the only service organization that has its flag flying among those from all the Nations at the UN?  That is because the Lions were instrumental in helping the UN get organized.  Later , at dark, we came back to Mathews County to watch the fireworks.  Let me share my thoughts about all this with you below the break.

I have spent this day thinking about what to share with our guests on this anniversary of our Nation's independence.  I am mute.  I have too many problems with my country right now.  Am I being too critical?  What would you tell them?  We fought a bloody war of revolution to free ourselves from the British tyrants.  That brings back a memory I can not shake.  During the Vietnam War, while I was a faculty member at SUNY at Buffalo, we ran a kind of "underground railroad" for draft resisters who did not want to spend time in jail.  We worked with some of our Canadian colleagues and their students to get our people jobs and places to live in Canada.  At one point the Canadians suggested we take a break from the tedium of resisting the war and have a party over there.  We took some of our students over and had a great evening.  At one point a Canadian student asked our students about the things they had heard about some movement people contemplating violence as a means of resisting the war.  One American student glibly answered:

Well, after all, we fought a violent revolution for our freedom!

 The Canadian students were silent for a moment and then one said:

But we didn't.

 That moment was devistating for me.  It has come back again and again as I recoil against the ease with which we use violence as a solution to problems in this beloved country of mine.  The Canadians have their problems too.  They certainly have resorted to violence against their native population from time to time.  They have joined us in our wars.  They have a prison population.  Yet, America seems too quick to use violence and uses far too much, in my estimation.  Now we have had the "velvet revolution" as the USSR colapsed.  We have had Martin Luther King and others who recoiled at the violence so readily called upon in our Nation.  We have had his violent death among so many others.  

We now are carrying on at least three violent wars in the world to protect our people from a threat that needs some risk analysis done on it.  We use the death penalty to attempt to solve the problem of violent crime.  Our prison system is an exercise in violence.  When a presidential candidate suggested that spending money on a peace academy would at least offset the vast amounts we spend on training people to kill, he was ridiculed and mocked.

So how to we explain the celebration today to these young citizens of the world visiting us today?  How to we answer the Canadian student about our glib defense of violence becasuse it was the mechanism of our break with British tyrany?  Is there a way of finding an alternative to violence as a solution to problems?  Is our need for force a statement about our designs on the freedom of others in the world or is it, as we claim, merely self defense?  These are the questions I had to face today.  I don't have the answers.  Can you help me?