“Search for peace,” a good message at any time, seems particularly important in this troubled summer. So it’s nice that today’s #stampoftheday is a 5-cent “Search for Peace” stamp issued on July 5, 1967. Although the stamp was issued at the height of the Vietnam War (and increasing protests against that war), it wasn’t a nod to that movement. Rather, it honored an essay contest sponsored by Lions Clubs International (LCI), which encouraged school children to devise plans for achieving world peace. (I guess they’re still working on it.). And although it probably wasn’t the intention at the time, the stamp, it seems to me, not only carries a cautionary warning for our times but also suggests a way out of some of our current woes.
To understand that, you have to know something about LCI. While I’ve seen Lions Club signs all over the place and vaguely known that Lions Clubs generally involve local businesspeople (usually men), I don’t know much about them. What I’ve now learned is that the International Association of Lions Clubs is the world’s largest service organization with about 1.4 million members in more than 44,500 clubs in over 200 countries. I’ve also learned that Lions movement grew in large measure out of the work of Melvin Jones, who around 1916 wanted to become more involved in his community and the world, and he wanted other businessmen to join him. As he described it, “What if these men who are successful because of their drive, intelligence and ambition, were to put their talents to work improving their communities?” Jones’ colleagues in a local business group agreed and contacted like-minded members of other groups in other cities, who came together to found Lions in 1917. A few years later, Jones became the group’s secretary and guiding voice. (Lions, by the way, stands for Liberty, Intelligence, Our Nations’ Safety.)
At their start, many Lions Clubs focused on supporting the war effort (America had just entered World War) by selling war bonds and collected reading materials to send the servicemen overseas. At the 1925 LCI convention, Helen Keller challenged the clubs to become Knights of the Blind, and delegates soon voted to adopt “Sight Conservation and Work for the Blind” as a major focus of their work. Over the years, the group has expanded its focus to also include drug awareness, hearing conservation, working with the deaf, citizenship, raising money for disaster victims and providing vocational training for the handicapped and the poor.
Lions Clubs plan and participate in a wide variety of service projects that meet the international goals of LCI as well as the needs of their local communities. Examples include donations to hospices, or community campaigns such as Message in a Bottle, a United Kingdom and Ireland initiative which places plastic bottles with critical medical information inside the refrigerators of vulnerable people. Lions Clubs also raise money for disaster aid and for international campaigns, coordinated by the Lions Clubs International Foundation, such as Sight First and Lions World Sight Day, which was launched in 1998 to draw world media attention to the plight of sight loss in the developing world.
Here’s a few other interesting things I learned. While local Lions Clubs clearly provide members with valuable networking opportunities, since its inception the group’s rules have included that fact that “no club shall hold out the financial betterment of its members as its object.” Rather, the groups are supposed to be guided by the Lions motto: “we serve.” Also, membership is by invitation only and, despite initially inviting women to join the Lions at their first annual convention, the group rescinded the invitation the following year. It wasn’t until 1987 that women were allowed to join local Lions chapters. And there are a variety of conspiracy theories about the Lions Club, many of them based on the fact that there often has been an overlap between Lions Clubs and Freemasonry. According to one author, “Freemasons are apparently in cahoots with the Lions Clubs and involved in plots ranging from the distribution of aspartame to control the human mind, to the death of John Paul I, to an apparent plot to spread Zionism.”
These clearly are pretty far-fetched, but in these times you never know what some people will believe. I believe that Lions Clubs are a notable example of the particularly American phenomenon of coming together in a host of voluntary organizations, described by Alexis de Tocqueville well before the Civil War (almost 100 years before the Lions Clubs came into being). This is not just a nice thing to have, he argued. Rather, it’s a foundational piece of our democracy because, according to de Tocqueville , “If men who live in democratic countries had neither the right nor the taste to unite in political goals, their independence would run great risks, but they could preserve their wealth and their enlightenment for a long time; whereas if they did not acquire the practice of associating with each other in ordinary life, civilization itself would be in peril. A people among whom particular persons lost the power of doing great things in isolation, without acquiring the ability to produce them in common, would soon return to barbarism.”
As many have documented, we Americans have become more isolated and less willing (and perhaps able) to come together in common cause. Hopefully we haven’t lost that skill entirely. With that in mind, perhaps it’s time for us to come together collectively and “search for peace.”
Be well, stay safe, fight for justice and work for (and search for) peace.