IT TAKES A VILLAGE TO KILL A CHILD
by Mike Robinson
On February 29th, 2000, in Michigan, USA, a 6 year old boy walked into his classroom and fatally shot a 6 year old classmate. A few days later the following insightful column appeared in a local newspaper.
"It takes a mother who is so strung out on drugs that she abandons her children. It takes a father who is married to one woman, 'engaged' to another, who has been sued for child support by three women he has never married.
It takes an uncle who lets his house become a drug den, even though his little 6 year old nephew is sleeping on the floor. It takes a teenager who steals a gun and then leaves it loaded on that floor, where the little boy can find the gun and take it to school.
It takes schools in which teachers are expected not merely to teach, but to be surrogate parents, counselors, and social workers.
It takes administrative rules that do not allow those teachers to mete out meaningful discipline.
It takes lawyers and judges who spend their careers extending 'procedural due process' to every facet of life, in an effort to ensure that individual rights will always and everywhere triumph over the interests of the community.
It takes a certain faith in the delusion that legal rights can be adequate substitutes for decent parents, decent schools, decent jobs, and decent neighborhoods.
It takes the peculiarly American obsession that demands the right to bear arms. It takes a government that registers cars and dogs but that will not register handguns.
It takes an entertainment industry that murders dozens of characters on television every night, and then wonders why our children turn violent fantasies into newspaper headlines.
It takes a culture that treats the right to bear children as sacred and inviolate, and then allows utterly unprepared teenage girls to raise their children without any interference (translation: help) from the so-called community.
It takes large doses of that brutal indifference to others which we call "tolerance."
A six year old child is shot to death in her own classroom, by her own classmate. It takes a village to kill a child. We - all of us - live in that village."
Only in America? I don't think so. Remember Port Arthur?