My wife teaches 7th grade Social Studies which in our school district means United States history from the Pilgrims through Reconstruction. She started the school year a couple weeks late (I'll save that for another story), so she's been scrambling to catch up to where she and the kids should be. Being the wonder-husband that I am, I've pitched in with my varied talents and am converting a couple VHS tapes to DVD (shhh, don't tell anyone I know how to do it, or I'll be converting everyone's).

So tonight's offering was April Morning. It's a TV movie with an amazing cast: Rip Torn, Tommy Lee Jones, Robert Urich, Chad Lowe and might I add Meredith Salenger is quite the babe. But I digress.

As I'm working through iMovie, trying to figure out where to put chapter markers I start to get the gist of the movie. Maybe I'm not understanding the movie so much as I'm getting a sense of what the Revolutionary War meant.

In our modern age, soldiers are trained—to kill. Call it discipline, call it combat skills, the military exists to train soldiers how to kill and how not to think but to do. I understand this is necessary because when you think about it war is mad. You are trying to kill another human being with the hope that if you kill enough of them their side will surrender. Is this not madness.

In the Revolutionary War, we didn't have trained soldiers. They were farmers and tradespeople whose families had come to the colonies for more freedom and maybe a chance for a better living than they would have had in England. Freedom they were willing to pick up a gun and kill another person to obtain. That's what floored me. They believed enough in what they were doing, they were willing to kill to obtain it. And it was only an idea. It wasn't for material wealth, the colonists hadn't found oil deposits and tried to steal them from the British. They wanted to be free of the tyranny imposed on them by an out-of-touch ruler.

Where is that strength of belief now? When we see it, we are afraid of it. It doesn't meld nicely with polite society. Is there any idea that would bind the population together to fight for it? 9/11? Maybe. With the exception of the lines at the airport I see a United States remarkably like the one pre-9/11.

I certainly don't have the answer. I can't think of something I would be willing to kill another human being to obtain. We have an exciting election coming up. Make sure you vote. Make that be your "shot heard 'round the world."