-- Jack Hayford

-- Chuck Colson, Breakpoint

-- Billy Graham

A Voice From Inside the "Culture of Death"

On April 20, 1999, there was yet another gruesome shooting in Littleton, Colorado. Kids killing kids. And again, the entire nation in its uproar is trying to figure out why.

I am eighteen years old. I live in a small town near Madison, Wisconsin. A small town just like the ones where these horrifying shootings always seem to take place. Every time those stories come on the television, I can't help but notice how easily my small town could be next. And I want to know why this is happening just as badly as any parent or police chief or anchorman.

The night of the Littleton shooting, as I was flipping through the various news channels that were covering the story in Littleton, Colorado, I heard something that struck a chord in me. An anchorman was interviewing the mother of a victim in the Jonesboro shooting. His question was: "If you look at America in the 1950s, you will find that this kind of thing never happened; whereas if you look at America today, this kind of thing is becoming more and more frequent. Why do you think this is happening?"

The woman, of course, could not answer the question. In fact, she didn't really even try. But I did. I thought about it for a long time that night. And again the next morning, when my favorite morning radio talk show asked its listeners why they thought this has been happening. Many people said it's the parents of the kids. Many people suggested television and video games. Many people even turned to popular musicians, looking to put the blame somewhere.

But I will tell you what I think it is. What I, a regular teenager riding on the coattails of Generation X, blame it on. It is not the parents or the movies or the rock stars. It is America. It is this culture of death, this culture in which we are so anxious to let anything be "OK" that the once tightened, knotted rope of society is unraveling right beneath us.

Don't you see? There can be no order without discipline. All of those things people think are causing children to run into a school and shoot their teachers and peers and even kids they don't know are only reflections of our society. It is not one thing or two things; it is the attitude of an entire nation being reflected back at us in the kids.

Just as that anchorman suggested, something was different about the 1950s. We had boundaries; we had a definite knowledge of right and wrong throughout the entire nation. We didn't have feminists pushing women so hard to go get a job that a woman who didn't have a job was somehow "bad," thereby leaving kids at home with inadequate parental guidance. We didn't have media dedicated to sex and violence so intense that if you weren't playing killing video games at age 14, then you were trying to choose between contraceptives beforehand or abortion afterwards. We didn't have disputes over whether or not we should help someone who is dying in committing suicide.

We live in a culture dedicated to death. If you don't want the kid, kill it. If you don't want to live out the rest of your God-given days, kill yourself. We are falling apart as a society. Am I -- some random teenager in Farmertown, U.S.A. -- the only one who sees that?

There is a great saying by a famous man that has rung true throughout the history of mankind in every family, in every society, in every social group and in every religion. It is a true statement that cannot be disputed. I am reminded of it now, in the wake of yet another indescribably tormenting result of a nation gone haywire...

"By their fruits you shall know them."

Sarah Roney graduated from Baraboo High School, Wisconsin, in May 1998. She is a freshman at the University of Wisconsin Center, Baraboo/Sauk County. We wish her every future success.

The Arithmetic of Human Value

Satellite photos show what appear to be mass graves. An entire village's population is missing. Young ethnic Albanian men aren't crossing Yugoslav borders and are presumed to have been killed by Serbs. Ethnic Albanian women are being herded into Serb army camps for rape, then murder. Western leaders refrain from using the term "genocide," because of the political weight that word carries in Europe. But genocide it appears to be.

NATO, meanwhile, devotes extraordinary resources to rescuing a handful of soldiers and to studying the downing of a stealth bomber. Any loss of Western life or weaponry, it seems, could sway public opinion against the campaign to stop Serbia's slaughter.

How could the loss of one American pilot tip a scale whose other side holds tens of thousands of Albanian lives? I don't wish to be callous about either side's loss of life or to question the rescue of soldiers. But a strange arithmetic seems to have become normative: some lives matter more than others, and some lives don't matter at all.

It starts at home. America's medical community performs heroic feats to save a life here, a life there. Meanwhile, human lives are squandered by the thousands at bestial housing projects located next door to high-tech hospitals.

In a public school classroom, a child with special needs is assigned his own special teacher, while other children work 30 to a teacher and crowd-control replaces learning.

In the courtroom, tobacco lawyers billing $300 an hour give Joe Camel a first-rate defense, while down the hall, domestic courts wade through human misery as fast as beaten women and neglected children can be herded into court.

To protect a single executive's salary, a company lays off hundreds of blue-collar workers. To prop up a stock price benefiting wealthy investors, a company shuts a factory which anchors an entire town.

A quiet suburban street gets a new surface, new striping and stop signs, while a dangerous intersection not far away goes unnoticed because, as one local puts it, "not enough people have died there yet."

This strange arithmetic is so prevalent, I doubt we even notice it. Like the king who sent peasants into slaughter to protect his crown, or the pope who ignored genocide to preserve church privilege, we spend some lives as if all life had no value.

I don't blame the well-insured parent for seeking quality care for his child, or the U.S. military for wanting to rescue one of its own or the handicapped child for needing special instruction. That isn't the point. The point is what about the others?

Does compassion only flow to those who can pay for it? Are the benefits of modernity apportioned entirely by the marketplace? Are we saying that getting one white child home safely from school matters more than monitoring the safety of one hundred black children because the white parent can pay for it? Do we allocate vast sums to medical care only because doing so is beneficial to medical schools, physicians and hospitals, whereas protecting children from abuse doesn't benefit anyone except the child?

I don't dispute our need to combat genocide in Yugoslavia. But I do wonder why we did so little when Ugandan and Rwandan dictators slaughtered their people.

Selective compassion ends up seeming episodic, and we aren't bound by our common humanity but by the calculus of advantage. We become like the wife who gets treated well only when she stays thin, pretty and sexually available.

When some lives are deemed expendable, all life is cheapened. When care flows only to those who can pay for it, none of us can earn enough. When some victims get a spotlight but others remain invisible, none of us is safe. May we have the courage to do right things more often, even when the victims aren't our kinsmen.

Tom Ehrich is a pastor, writer and software developer living in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Media Violence - A Cause of School Killings

Dr. Ted Baehr, publisher of Movieguide, the nation's family-friendly guide to movies and entertainment, blames violence in the media as the main causal factor in the shooting deaths April 20 at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, where 15 people were killed.

"The largest generation in the history of our country is being trained to kill!" Baehr asserted. Baehr, who is also chairman of the Christian Film and Television Commission, went on, "The key to this horrible slaughter was that these kids loved computer war games like Battle Tech. As another student said, 'They would take them to the extreme. It is like they were role-playing.'" On April 20, 1999, this role-playing had tragic consequences for scores of students and teachers.

"Thousands of research studies now show the harmful influence of violence and sex in the media on children at susceptible stages of cognitive development," says Baehr, whose book, The Media-Wise Family, reviews the effects of violence and sex in the media.

"As Dr. David Grossman, a military psychologist, has shown," Baehr noted, "video games are a form of conditioning similar to the kind of training that young men and women get in the military. Such training teaches them how to automatically kill other people. The mass media in America are creating a generation of homemade sociopaths who kill reflexively, with no remorse!"

Baehr cited scientific studies that now prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that violence on TV and in movies and video games increases violent, aggressive behavior in society, especially in susceptible children, teenagers and young adults. Baehr also said that today's children have "rotten role models" in the shape of rock singers like Marilyn Manson and movies like Natural-Born Killers.

"I have heard few voices raised on television about the media's role in this horrible situation," Baehr said. "I believe we now have amongst many of our children a media-induced anarchy in which anger and hatred seem to be part of the equation. Many of these kids have acquired a fascination with evil, Hitlerism, death and destruction as well as power and fear, suicide and murder."

Baehr continued: "Teenagers in the reflection stage of cognitive development are most vulnerable in school. They think the world is focused on them, what they wear and how they look. They form gangs and groups for protection or retreat into personal hiding places. They seek to prove themselves

and show the world that their appearances don't reflect on who they are. They fail to consider the consequences of their actions. The school is a common meeting place where all these forces come into play."

Baehr added: "There is a solution to this problem, however. Teach your children to be media literate. Teach them about their stages of development, how the media influences them and how a strong faith and core values can protect them. If you make your kids media-wise, they will be your allies.

Dan Wooding leads ASSIST ministries in Southern California.

Hearts in the Emergency Room

How can we live day-to-day with our children in a world spinning out of control?

We were on our way home from the orthodontist -- eleven-year-old Ben, eight-year-old Sophia sporting new rainbow braces, and I -- when we heard the news of the latest casualty in the epidemic of teen shoot-'em-ups.

This time I could not hold back the tears.

I flashed back to the first time Sophia heard the news of a mother who murdered her children. She turned to me, eyes filled with fear.

"Mommy," she whispered, "How could a mommy do that?"

I wept that time, too, because I already knew the answer.

We had been heading for it for two decades -- since Roe v. Wade, then a triumph for this radical feminist, pro-abortion spokeswoman. In those days I scoffed at the stodgy, moralistic opposition with their talk of slippery slopes and respect for human life. I just didn't get it.

I get it now.

Now with a quarter-century hindsight, I'd say the slippery slope turned out to be a perilous precipice. Once we fell off the edge, we were in moral freefall. But who could have guessed that in the next 25 years U.S. mothers would choose to end the lives of 35,000,000 children through abortion? Or, that by 1996 the murder rate for infants less than a week old would double (Newsweek, 12/2/96)?

The children who we spared, the children who happened to arrive at times when they were "wanted" or "convenient" or "affordable" -- or those whose valiant mothers bore them anyway -- they are now the children like Sophia, the children who want to know why. Though my own early years were far from ideal -- neglected, poor, alone -- I never remember being afraid for my life. As a latchkey kid, I pulled my key from under the mat. I rode my bike and rollerskated around Washington D.C. with a freedom my own kids -- now "safe" in suburbia -- will never know.

Can we even begin to imagine the toll it must take on our children to hear daily of violence against children -- by strangers, by parents and now by kids at school? And why are so many children now turning to violence themselves? Clearly, we've taught them their lives are worth little. Children are not too clueless to grasp their own unimportance in their parents' scheme of things. First of all, we've given them a degree of freedom that says we don't really care. We've turned them loose in a wilderness without a moral compass. Parents who've found fault with faith have given their children nothing else to replace it.

Kids know they're not important enough to keep their parents' marriage together. Nor can they compete for mom's time with career or a more affluent lifestyle.

The Me-Me-Me Generation has done a bang-up job of convincing their kids that kids are expendable.

In 1989, Bob Dylan wrote:

"We live in a political world

Courage is a thing of the past

Houses are haunted, children aren't wanted

The next day could be your last."

I know because I've lived through them before: we are living in radical times. Times that call for a new counterculture -- those willing to go against the flow, to say it doesn't mean a thing if our pockets, our refrigerators, our gas tanks, our IRAs are full, if our hearts are running on empty. The Bible says, "What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?" (Mark 8:36).

Society's future depends on parents who will give their children a spiritual foundation. Often, people like me -- who had to start from scratch to find out how.

My husband Tripp and I are often asked how we have produced so many good children. I can only share the truth -- that we haven't done it alone. No, it didn't take a village. Our faith in God has seen us through -- faith which goes beyond church on Sunday and grace at meals, to a more relational, sustaining approach.

"The Lord will guide you always; he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land and will strengthen your frame. You will be like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail."

That's also a Bible verse, Isaiah 58:11. Myself, I didn't grow up with the Bible. Yet in its pages my children and I have found goodness, guidance and grace.

Words that bring comfort at times like these.

Barbara Curtis is a two-time recipient of the Amy Foundation Writing Award.

Lessons from Littleton

The innocents are buried. The media stampede is over in Littleton, Colorado. But if the images we've seen these past months are accurate, the people of Littleton will survive. And we should take notice.

Although there is second-guessing and questions galore, what we mostly see now are people continuing to comfort one another in churches, in private ceremonies and public outpourings. The irony, of course, is that the public sector is legally banned from providing the succor and comfort the students of Columbine High School really need.

Immediately after the tragedy that killed 15 classmates, students addressed the deep emotional and spiritual issues as they prayed beside the flower-covered cars, talked of their friends who wanted to be missionaries, and wept with Vice President Al Gore who preached from a mini-mall pulpit.

At Rachel Scott's funeral, Pastor Bruce Porter noted: "Prayer was re-established in our public schools last Tuesday. What the judiciary couldn't do, what the churches couldn't do, the children did themselves."

Most of our communities aren't Littleton. But that tragedy could be repeated anywhere. And our students know it.

That's why hundreds of our children gather around their school flagpole once a month to pray, and weekly Bible clubs attract scores of students. At Westlake High in Thousand Oaks, California, Bible club attendance of 100 is not uncommon. That's true in other schools around our country. At these prayer sessions, students ask God to protect their teachers and administrators; they pray for harmony in their school; and they ask God to use them to help the Eric Harrises and Dylan Klebolds in their midst.

Religious parents support our schools from a distance. Moms in Touch is a national movement in which groups of mothers meet in homes to pray specifically for their children's schools. Moms sometimes write special notes of encouragement to teachers and help grade papers or perform other chores to help teachers.

Still, walls between schools and religious institutions remain high. When people of faith point out that education must involve the intellect, emotions and spiritual nature of people, they are often told to stay out of the domain of public schools -- "Don't call us, we'll call you."

In Littleton, when disaster struck, much of the counseling occurred in a Catholic church building, and churches and church leaders became prominent players in the recovery process. This apparently occurred with the consent and encouragement of school officials.

Would that happen in your city if -- God forbid -- something terrible happened? Formal and informal relationships between school officials and people of faith should be built now. In an atmosphere of cordiality and concern, parents can encourage their kids to get involved with, or start, Bible clubs or Christian fellowships on campuses. Parents and pastors can also volunteer to help where needed in their schools and help make school administrators and teachers aware of faith-based resources that exist in the area. These relations will prove valuable even if we never experience something terrible like that in Littleton.

In this way, we can help the thousands of kids who think religion in the schools is important enough for them to form Bible clubs and pray publicly for their schools -- even to risk ridicule for their faith.

Let's continue to encourage them while building bridges between our schools and our churches.

Ken Waters is an associate professor of journalism at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California.