BE READY TO LOVE THOSE ANGRY TEENS.

Byline: Laura Doyle

I am riddled with the uneasy disquiet of someone who didn't do enough. I could have helped prevent the tragedy in Littleton, Colo., but didn't. I even had the opportunity to speak to the whole nation but shied away from the risk of exposing my own vulnerability, my own painful teen-age years. And the costs for me is 15 dead in Colorado.

I am a television writer, born in America and raised in Canada. I see America with the eyes of a visitor, so possibly my view is more impartial, possibly more open to all the possibilities.

Last year, I traveled coast to coast around this great country and landed in Hollywood to write an episode for the CBS show ``Early Edition.'' My episode was about a shooting that happened in a middle school in Chicago. I was interested in bringing awareness to viewers about guns in schools and also my own inner quest to know why. Why do kids shoot up their schools?

I spent a few days at the National School Safety Center in Westlake Village pouring over the files of more than 50,000 newspaper articles looking for my answer. The real answer came when we began to break the story for the episode.

I've been writing in the teen genre for almost 10 years now (mostly in Canada). Though I'm no Felicity (I'm 34), I still have access to my experience of that formative and volatile time in my life. So what I know now that I was too afraid to speak to on mainstream television is that these children feel unheard, unseen and unloved. They are ostracized, labeled as outcasts, treated like monsters.

And they will make you listen, America. Any way they can, even if it means taking their own sweet lives and the lives of your children. And I think the shootings will continue until you get the message.

The correlation between their result and their goal is undeniable to me. They wanted to be seen and heard and now you can't turn on the TV without seeing coverage of the shooting. They wanted to be loved and you can bet that there will be family aplenty gathered at their gravesides talking about how much they loved the dearly departed.

America, you have taught your children to hate, to treat others as misfits, to judge, to ostracize. How can anyone on the planet not belong here? We all belong. Everyone of us has a gift.

If you want your children to be safe, start including every kid in the neighborhood, every person you judge as part of the global village. Be willing to risk loving those angry teen-agers. I know they will send you away with their rage, scare you with their pain, but love them, surround them with love like water surrounds a fish.

I see this shooting as a failure on my part, on our part as a nation, a global community to love. Each one of us ostracizes. We emotionally kick the undesirable people off the planet every day. And we've taught our children well. They do as we've told them, as we've shown them.

Oh, and by the way, America the beautiful, I don't think we should go around blaming the generation, calling them selfish, detached, violent. We were and are the same. We created this world that fluctuates between the polarities of love and hate.

If we want to change it, we will have to take some responsibility for the way it is now.