By MONROE ROARK
mroark@thecitizennews.com

Sometimes it seems as though we live in two separate nations within the United States.

It's nearly impossible to shock me with the evening news anymore, but last night's edition came close. My wife and I watched reports of an incident on the south side of Chicago where two men, one is his 50s and one in his 60s, were beaten and hit with bricks until they died in the street at the hands of maybe a dozen other people. A crowd of about 100 stood and watched this horrific event.

According to reports, these two men were murdered because their van accidentally jumped a curb and struck three women sitting on the sidewalk. A Chicago police officer called it a "traffic accident." That appears to be all the motivation some local thugs needed to kill these defenseless men. (I wonder if a friend of the victims could have stopped the attack with a gun but that's another column.)

As I watched the story unfold, I thought of how much this resembled a mob scene from a "Gladiator"-era movie. One man on television even use the term "stoning" and said that such activities haven't been seen since Biblical times.

It doesn't take long, after thinking about episodes like this and all of the other carnage in the news children kidnapped and killed, people generally behaving like animals to one another to wonder if civilization itself is not about to collapse under the weight of such depravity. One begins to wonder if America is going the way of the Romans.

But then you see and hear a story like the one that took place last weekend in Pennsylvania. A nation sits glued to its television sets wondering if nine miners trapped hundreds of feet below ground will survive in their watery prison, or if the people above will be resourceful enough to get them out safely.

As you all probably know by now, that story ended happily. As of the last report I saw, all but one of the nine had been released from the hospital with no major injuries to show for 77 hours underground in very cold water.

This event shows what is great about this country on so many levels. First of all, these were ordinary people like all of us who work hard every day and do the best we can to provide for ourselves and our families. When an extraordinary situation came about, they got together and worked nonstop to see it resolved.

It cannot be overlooked that technology played a role in this case as well. What happened in Pennsylvania last week could have very well ended badly in a more remote location, especially in a country that does not have the resources available in the United States. That, in itself, speaks volumes about the ingenuity and achievements of Americans over the past 200-plus years.

I would wager that many of the folks who pitched in to help with the rescue did so on their own time and their own dime, aside from the emergency professionals on the scene, and many of them probably did not even know any of the victims personally. There are still a lot of people in this country who will step up and lend a hand when needed, regardless of who is involved.

And when the last of the miners was pulled from the earth, as a nation rejoiced in what was repeatedly called a "miracle," the testimonies of the miners and their families suggested that they thought the rescue was exactly that a miracle. One cannot count the number of times these people made reference to prayer and faith as the two main ingredients that held the entire operation together, as rescue workers overcame physical conditions that did little to suggest there was any hope of recovering any of the men, let alone all nine.

Faith, ingenuity, and hard work. Those are traits you can build a nation on. And any astute observer of history will tell you that the United States of America, in spite of the negative and tragic news we are swamped with every day, has been built on precisely that.

[Monroe Roark can be reached at mroark@TheCitizenNews.com.]

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