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 lmost exactly eight years ago I was at Walt Disney World in
Florida, pushing a wheelchair occupied by a little boy of seven years who
had already lost a leg to cancer and would, on Aug. 1 of that year, lose
his life. I say this to let the reader know that I am aware of the fact
that if there is something worse than the death of a child, I have yet to
encounter it.
Fourteen kids and one adult are dead, and for no good reason. The
horrid events in Littleton, Colo., last week cause us all first to wince,
then to feel the loss of other parents and, last of all, to ask why it
had to happen.
This last question cannot ever be answered with certainty. To look
into another human heart is something none of us can really do. We can
only guess and hope that something like this stays a long way away from
our own families. This does not, however, stop people from taking this
incident and using it as fodder for their own political views.
The first and most predictable reactors to this event were the
gun-control advocates. It had to be the guns' fault, they said even
before the last sad echoes faded. (The two alleged criminals also used
explosive devices; why not do away with chemistry class in addition to
toughening up gun-control laws?) The media dutifully reported this view,
because they, as a rule, follow the cant of the political left, because
for the news media the Constitution starts and ends with the 1st
Amendment and not even all of that.
"Congress," this part of the Constitution says, "shall pass no law
respecting an establishment of religion," and then it goes on to protect
the press, freedom of speech and assembly. This first entry in the Bill
of Rights is taught to kids in school as freedom of religion. Yet current
political culture twists it into freedom from religion. The political
left bridles at the mere recitation of a single prayer in public schools.
Why? Well, it offends some of those among us who choose not to believe in
God, and since those people may be offended (especially the noisy ones),
this small minority is able to impose its views on the majority, and to
do so with the blessing--nay the advocacy--of the "progressive" elements
of our political culture.
I suppose my first reaction is, what's the big deal? If atheists don't
believe, what possible interest could they have in the words of those who
do? Oh, yeah, the kids of parents who choose not to believe can't be
exposed to a contrary outlook, lest they be polluted by it. We can't have
the public schools inculcating belief in something like that--and we
don't.
Instead we have schools promoting "value-neutral" cant. Modern school
books tell kids that stealing, for example, is wrong, not because it's
"wrong," but rather because after stealing you might feel badly about it
later on. Better, isn't it, to let kids mush along with their own
subculture and figure things out for themselves, albeit with the help of
rap music and Web sites about Adolf Hitler?
I never attended public schools. My parents sent me to Catholic ones,
where education in religion was part of the curriculum, and along with
that came a few simple rules: killing and stealing were out. Why? Because
they were wrong. A simple bit of advice for a child to absorb, and
evidently effective. Nobody shot up St. Matthew Elementary School while I
was there--and back then gun-control laws were far more lax than they are
now. Crime was also a far more rare event.
There's a lot more to it than that, of course, but the simple fact is
that the political left has assumed ownership of the rules of
contemporary society. They have replaced right and wrong with something
else, and one result of this is that there were no people to take the two
adolescent shooters in Littleton aside and say, "Hey, guys, this Hitler
chap you talk about, he was not much of a role model, and, by the way,
whatever problems you may have with your schoolmates, we can work on
that, and maybe if you change a little, they will, too, and whatever
feelings of rejection you have will fade away in a relatively short
period of time."
But nobody intervened, and evidently nobody told these two misguided
kids that some things are objectively wrong. Perhaps too many public
schoolteachers do not view morals instruction as being within their
professional purview. Perhaps their union disapproves of prayers and
morality-teaching as much as the ACLU does. Maybe it was their parents'
fault, maybe the fault of many segments of society. The final score is
dismally simple: These two boys did what they did because nobody told
them convincingly that to do so was horribly wrong.
So maybe, just maybe, we can allow public schools to tell kids that
some things are just plain wrong? The problem with that is that our ideas
of right and wrong ultimately come from a source higher than government.
And to say such a thing would offend atheists. But if you remove
something and fail to replace it with something else, there will be a
downstream effect.
These two kids used guns and some homemade explosives. In the former
case, let's try to remember that guns are inanimate objects. They do not
leap up and operate on their own accord. A person, misguided or not, has
to do that. The person may be motivated by greed, hatred or madness, and
in some cases there is nothing we can do about the wishes of that human
heart. But in some cases we can, if we think a little about what ideas we
trouble ourselves to teach our children. It is neither difficult nor
particularly offensive to instruct children in the better reasons rather
than casting them adrift to find the worse ones on their own untutored
accord.
- - -
Tom Clancy's Latest Novel Is "Rainbow Six" (Putnam, 1998)
Copyright 1999 Los Angeles Times. All Rights Reserved
Search the archives of the Los Angeles Times
for similar stories. You will not be charged to look for stories, only to retrieve one.
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