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 [email protected].]