We've changed

It's been less than two years

since the Columbine High School tragedy rocked our collective conscience.

There were several high profile school shootings before Columbine, but

Columbine seemed to solidify the behavior as a cultural malaise which

affects us all.

Another high-profile shooting

last week in Santee, Calif., and the inevitable onslaught of public opinion

in its wake, reveals that in the less than two years span of time, we've

learned a lot as a society. And as a society, we still have a lot more

ground to cover to fully understand the scope of these tragedies and more

importantly, to do what we can to prevent another one.

What have we learned? How are

we reacting differently?

The first thing that struck

me in the aftermath was the much softer cry for more gun control. The

incident at Columbine in 1999 became the rallying point for gun control

advocates, even to the extent that the National Rifle Association, America's

premier gun rights organization, had to move their annual meeting out

of Colorado in the aftermath.

What we've learned as a public,

though, is that many current gun laws are broken routinely, and when they

are enforced, they're often not prosecuted to the fullest extent of the

law. That's not a gun control problem. That's a self-control problem.

Another realization came as

we recognized as a public that this president was not going to politicize

human tragedy. It got to the point during the Clinton administration that

the inevitable roar of the Clinton spin machine after an outbreak of school

violence became just as predatory as the violence itself.

When a nation weeps, it wants

to know that its president weeps with them. With Clinton, human suffering

was a sound bite and a photo op, or so it seemed to those of us with so

little faith that he would lead us in the way that we should go.

And what have we learned from

the media, or more aptly, what has the media learned from us?

We've learned that we don't

want 24-hour-a-day coverage for two straight weeks of our society at its

worst. We don't want sensational news coverage, or the prostitution of

human emotion and grief. We don't want to hear from a bunch of detached

psychiatrists and counselors about how our detached society is responsible

for breeding killers. We don't want to hear a check list of anecdotal

remedies to a problem that is real. We don't want to hear could've, would've,

should've. We'd rather hear, "We don't know. It's unfathomable."

What we want is honesty and perspective.

So what can we do now, as a

society, to move beyond this tragedy?

Let's get real. For starters,

let's face up to the fact that we are a nation of privilege and opportunity.

We've been spoiled because we've had it so good for so long, we've forgotten

that past generations fought hard and suffered much.

Let's critically question how

we've been raising our children. We are the spoiled raising the spoiled.

It seems to me that the whole "child-centered" movement in the

realms of child-rearing and education have created whole generations of

self-centered children.

We've praised and patted and

puffed up our children with overmuch pride and self-satisfaction. We've

tried to "give" them a positive self-image that can only be

earned, and the false bravado it creates becomes a fissure in their character.

Then pane by pane, their little glass houses are built on these weak foundations

that we as a society have constructed for them.

Inevitably, life has a way

of rubbing our noses in our own failures, and these overinflated children

grow up and confront the untruths that we told them. Their worlds shake

with an upheaval that is universal in the teenage years, and with the

bucking and lurching of reality comes a triad of reaction.

Some become bullies and try

to compensate for their hollow self-images by deflating others. Others,

worn tight and angry by the constant taunting of their peers, but cracked

in their character foundation in much the same way, explode under the

pressure. And the rest, fortunately most, become strong in spite of it,

and in spite of us, even.

The vast majority come to know

that satisfaction is born of hard work, that achievement is the product

of effort and knowledge, and that overall success pushes beyond failure

and is not born on the backs of others. The truly successful look beyond

themselves and into the world to see what good they can make of it.

How much easier would it all

be if they were taught these things overtly from the beginning by learning

that they are NOT the center of the universe?

If we want to find the cause

of what's happening with our kids, perhaps we should look in the mirror.

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