KIDS KILLING KIDS : Does Columbine tell us anything?

When the terrible news came from Littleton, Colorado, I thought about some of the worst times that were part of my own high school years, which began in the late fifties.

It's been said that there are two types of human beings: those who enjoyed high school and those who thought it was hell. I was one of the latter. I was also the kind of kid I wouldn't have wanted my kids to hang out with: I was sharp-tongued with teachers and didn't care about the consequences, read beat poetry behind the covers of civics texts, and avoided studying things that didn't interest me.

One of my classmates was in even more dire straits. Maybe because I could be sufficiently rough with a put-down, I didn't come in for much bullying, but Bill did. He wore his pants high and buttoned his shirt all the way up to the neck-OK now, but not then-and he carried a slide rule. For these sins he was picked on from the start of his freshman year by a sophomore, a born bully, and the regular stage for his torment was the bus they rode home together.

One day Bill had enough. He threw a vial of dilute hydrochloric acid into his tormentor's face. The bully staggered around, screamed, had scars on his face for weeks. Bill was expelled. The rest of us felt that some justice had been done-to the bully, not Bill-and we were sorry the scars turned out not to be permanent.

Adolescence is a strange time. All of the "what can we do?" talk that has followed Littleton is empty, because the answer is, nothing much, except, of course, realize that we really do have a culture fixated on emptiness and spiritual death, and it can't be fixed by laws. I don't deny for a moment that if guns were less available there might have been fewer gun deaths, but young alienated people who wanted to kill other people could have mixed up something like sarin gas in another context and done the same evil thing another way. It is a typically shallow move for us to think that there is a legal or political fix for a problem which goes deeper than law, and typically shallow for us to think that law is as deep as it goes.

I grew up in the Midwest around a gun culture. A lot of my schoolmates hunted and grew up in homes where guns were kept close at hand, not for any paranoid reason but because that was the way things were. One of my friends was killed in a shooting accident, but it happened in the sort of shooting-range circumstance that even the strictest gun-control countries allow. Our usual violence took the form of fistfights, which drew us the way bearbaiting or cockfighting might have if we'd had the opportunities for them. And our parents knew very little about the violence that appealed to us, about the fights, or the strangeness of our teachers, or much else. Even then, we didn't talk enough. I think it went with the stage of life. I never felt I couldn't talk with my parents about anything. I just didn't think it was any of their business. I could handle it-abusive teachers, friends being abused sexually or in other ways, anything.

Adolescents are more alone and on their own than we want to think, and in our society they are particularly bereft. It is necessary for people at this age to establish themselves as responsible in ways distinct from their parents-their bodies are beginning to establish this necessity, and it isn't all about sex, but about subtle forms of power and responsibility-but we make them dependent and in any serious way irresponsible until (if they go to college) they are about twenty-two years old. In the meantime, our culture sees them as a consumer group, to be sold movies full of violence and things you can buy that will make you more appealing to those who bully the unappealing. Outside of some religious communities, adolescents are given very little serious moral responsibility beyond a confused obedience-to what manufactured needs? And there are studies that show that parents spend much less time now with their children than they used to.

The conservative appeals to family values have often been mocked. When "family values" mean antigay legislation or denying the need to help working parents get day care, the critics have a point-particularly because the more common problem for families is divorce and single- parent households. But strong families, communication within families, and the need for families to stress moral and spiritual values to their children-communicating this by spending time with children, and not just pontificating-are in fact essential, more to the point than any possible legislation. To the extent that conservatives are saying this, they are right on target.

In this dark time, there is the story of Cassie Bernall, a seventeen- year-old girl. A couple of articles, in the Boston Globe and the conservative Weekly Standard, tell her story. She was a student at Colombine High School who for some time had played around with drugs, was interested in witchcraft, worried her parents enough so that they removed her from a public school and put her in a Christian school. She hated it, but when a friend invited her to a Christian camp she went, and her life changed. She asked her parents to put her back into a public school, where she talked with classmates who were willing to listen about her belief in Christ. On April 20 in the Columbine library, one of the gunmen singled her out, and asked, "Do you believe in God?" She paused, a friend who saw this said later, knowing what the answer would probably mean, and said, "Yes, I believe in God." He said, "Why?", didn't wait for an answer, and shot her.

After her death her brother found something she had written: "Now I have given up on everything else-I have found it to be the only way to really know Christ and to experience the mighty power that brought him back to life again, and to find out what it really means to suffer and to die with him. So, whatever it takes, I will be one who lives in the fresh newness of life of those who are alive from the dead." Before her death, Cassie had been involved with other members of her youth group in visits to a Denver inner-city storefront church which ministered to prostitutes and drug addicts.

Adolescence is a terrible time, and in some of what she told friends it is clear that Cassie knew it was scary. Looking at the kids with guns, at their murderous emptiness and despair, we are horrified and should be. Looking at a seventeen-year-old girl who can arrive at what Cassie did, we should see a sign of the kingdom.