Cold resolve, not fretting, will thwart world's snipers
Wed Oct 16, 8:59 AM ET
Kathleen Parker
story.news.yahoo.com
All of our victims have been innocent and defenseless, but now we're stepping over the line. Shooting a kid -- it's getting really, really personal now.
-- Montgomery County, Md., Police Chief Charles Moose, talking about the Washington-area sniper
Moose's comment must seem clumsy to the families of the 10 others murdered or injured by the sniper, including the husband whose wife was killed before his eyes in a suburban Home Depot parking lot Monday night. But it underscores today's reality: Even our children are no longer safe.
In the days since the sniper shot and seriously injured a 13-year-old outside his Bowie, Md., middle school, parents, teachers and the usual array of crisis experts have wondered how to talk to fearful children -- the same children, after all, who not so long ago witnessed the 9/11 terrorist attacks and lived through the anthrax mailings.
What's childhood like for them? Certainly not innocent. How do we explain to them what's happening? How do we protect them?
Such questions trouble a nation that treats childhood as a sacrament. Our concern is appropriate -- but such concerns are not new elsewhere in the world. We Americans have been living in a bubble, notwithstanding such aberrations as the Columbine killers, this summer's rash of kidnappings and the brief period during the Cuban missile crisis when baby boomers crouched under school desks.
In much of the world, childhood isn't much more than a euphemism for ''not dead yet.'' Israeli children aren't spared the horrors of buses exploding bloody body parts as suicide bombers infiltrate their streets. Palestinian children aren't protected from becoming collateral damage during counterattacks or even from their own parents, some of whom long for their children's' martyrdom.
Childhood horrors
Charles Jacobs, president of the American Anti-Slavery Group, wrote recently in the Israel Insider of atrocities committed against children in Sudan, where slavery has been revived. In Khartoum, Arab militias kill men and gang rape women and children. Girls are forced into domestic service while boys are traded as goat herders.
By comparison, our fears are minor, few and recent.
So what? Pain and fear elsewhere don't minimize pain and fear at home. True, but listening to ourselves fret about the anxieties of our children reminds us that we have been blessed with sheltered lives. Moreover, it reminds us of how much we take for granted and, most important, how much we have to protect and fight for.
Before 9/11, careful parents focused on protecting their children from our own culture. In a painfully short time, we have cast our attention from make-believe movie and music violence to the real deal.
Why isn't action taken?
Jacobs' point in writing about Sudan was to underscore the absence of outrage. Where, he asks, are the human-rights groups that rush to the Palestinian territories to investigate false rumors of Israeli atrocities when 2 million people are exterminated in Sudan?
He rejects the notion that Westerners don't care about blacks and suggests that we tend to focus our attention on oppressors who resemble ourselves. If whites were slaughtering blacks in Africa, we wouldn't stand for it; otherwise, it's someone else's business.
Recent events may change that. After 9/11, Americans reordered their priorities. Families discovered kinship; neighbors rediscovered community. After the sniper's meanest shot, parents raced to reclaim their children's innocence.
We are in and of this world now, no more immune from human viciousness than the children of Sudan or the babies of East Jerusalem. As we seek to gain sovereignty over our own sudden fragility, averting our eyes from what happens elsewhere is no longer an option. America's attitude of isolationism, we now know, was an attitude of denial.
No number of psychological experts or crisis managers can assuage the fears of children justly frightened or adults rightly outraged. America's children will feel safe when its grownups stop twisting their hankies in front of TV cameras, cease fretting about feelings and stonily face their enemies with whatever it takes.
Kathleen Parker, an Orlando Sentinel columnist, is syndicated by Tribune Media Services. |
