Just, DAMN!.

Via Kim du Toit comes this outstanding essay on The High Road message board entitled There Are No Barbarians at the Gates. This might be vain, but I mean this sincerely: I wish I had written that. PLEASE go read it.

I did write something roughly tangent to the subject a long time ago at Themestream.com. March 7, 2001, I published Barbarians in the Village:

This week there have been not one, but two shootings on primary school campuses. Two people have died and numerous others were wounded. Both shooters were minors.

William J. Bennett was quoted once on the problem in America's schools. "Teachers were asked in 1940", he said, "what the three largest problems were in America's schools. Their answer was noise, littering, and chewing gum. Teachers were asked last year (1992) what the three largest problems in America's schools were, and the answer was assault, rape, and suicide."

Kids have picked on and ridiculed other kids since there have been kids. Kids killing other kids is a fairly recent phenomenon, however. Is society at fault? Parents? Teachers? School administrators? Our elected representatives? The media? The kids themselves?

Yes. All of the above.

Since the 1950's parents have increasingly relinquished their parental responsibilities to the schools, where education is no longer the goal, state supported day-care is. The schools have increasingly relinquished their responsibility to educate, and cannot maintain order and discipline under the constant threat of lawsuit. This has resulted in repeated generations of kids who receive less and less education, attention, and discipline as they grow up to become teachers, administrators, elected officials, members of the media and parents themselves, all the while concerned about themselves first and foremost. After all, nobody spent any time on them when they were kids. The hard, critical job of being a parent has now been reduced to making sure little Johnny is wearing the fashionable shoe of the week and has a brand-new chrome scooter like all of the "in" kids do.

So we have come to this - kids who kill because they're unpopular.

I'm not accusing all parents of doing a poor job, but how many does it take to destroy the system? Just a very few. Hillary Clinton wrote a much maligned book entitled "It Takes a Village:" in which she stated that it takes that village to raise a child. I may not agree with anything else the junior Senator from New York has to say, but on that point she's right. Whether we like it or not, the village raises our children. How much influence the village has is inversely proportional to how much influence the family has on the child. When the entire attention a child receives from his parents is clothing and material goods, the kids turn to the rest of society, our village, to tell them how to live. And our village tells them that violence is an acceptable method of solving our problems.

It took 50 years to get where we are today. The question now isn't how do we stop it, it is can we stop it?

In another column I wrote: "We don't live in the United States of America anymore, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. We live in `Merica, land of the free to do whatever we please, with no adverse consequences to our actions because that just wouldn't be "fair". Ain't Democracy wunnerful? Let's just vote ourselves bread and circuses and wait for the Barbarians to come over the walls." I was referring, of course, to the fall of the Roman Empire, whose death-knell was heralded by the empire being overrun by the barbarians they used to keep at bay.

I was wrong. Our barbarians are already inside the walls. Our barbarians are us.

"Control Group," the author of There Are No Barbarians at the Gates points out quite starkly that the barbarians have always been inside our gates. And as the post below illustrates, England seems to be re-learning this fact about now.