Generally: If you look at America out of context with the history of the rest of the world, you will see a substantial amount of violence. It started with a revolution and expanded with such self-righteously aggressive concepts as "Manifest Destiny." Rarely does a generation go by that the United States is not engaged in a war or major conflict with one or more other nations, or, at times, internal conflicts, such as the Civil War, or some of the early labor disputes, or some of the more violent responses to the Civil Rights movement in the Sixties.

But—if you look at the history of other nations, I don't think you will find that the United States is any more or less violent than many other large nations. There are nations that seem to get along very nicely without violence, at least within recent times, such as Canada, which I don't see getting involved in international disputes unless they are dragged into it by someone else (usually the U. S.), and the Scandinavian countries, which, in the main, seem to me to be amazingly civilized compared to most. And if we in the U. S. dropped some of our economic prejudices, I think we could learn a great deal from them. Happy, productive people who have leisure time to enjoy life, respect for culture and tradition without feeling they have to push it on the rest of the world, an effective social safety net with excellent health care, no poor, no inordinately rich, everyone has enough, and they are not aggressive, indeed often coming to the aid of other countries in need. This is something we would do well to emulate (whether they are "socialistic" [shudder with horror!] or not). That is, if our leaders, both in and out of political office, had an ounce of humanity and were not so pathologically caught up in the narrow realms of greed, power-lust, and "our rightful place in the world," i.e. economic and political domination.

American ideals are exemplary. But this country, in general, lacks the courage to bring those ideals into fruition. After all, we, the people, are supposed to be an "informed electorate" and our public servants are supposed to be working for us, not just for themselves and their own grasping little cliques. Get off your butts, people! Learn! Get involved! The 2004 election is not that far away!!

Personally: Within my own experience (and, like Uncle DaveO, I've been here awhile; I'll be 72 my next birthday), I personally have seen very little actual violence. I have never been involved in any, apart from sporting events—I used to fence when I was younger (fencing is more skill and tactics than physical violence), and I've done a lot of shooting—at paper targets and empty soft drink cans (target shooting is more like golf that anything violent). I have seen about three bar-fights in my life, and a shouting-match/push fest in front of a restaurant once, but it was pretty obvious that it also was fueled by over-consumption of booze.

I have seen lots of violence—in movies and on television screens. Of all the people I have met in my life, I can only think of three or four that I would consider to be violent people, and they had mental problems and could hardly be considered "typical Americans."

On the other hand, of our national leaders, especially the current ones, I don't consider them to be "typical Americans" either.

Don Firth