Kay S. Hymowitz examines the moral confusion of many American teens (Columbine, Rockdale, etc.) and locates it in the failure of parents to impart enduring moral traditions to their children. Many parents have effectively abandoned their children to the dominant culture. Some parents are as immature as the children.
(Winter 200) Nine months ago, two seemingly ordinary boys from normal middle- class families walked into their high school in an affluent suburb of Denver and shot and killed 12 of their classmates and a teacher before finally turning their guns on themselves. It was a watershed moment in contemporary American life, a definitive fall from innocence that made parents and teachers look on their kids with unfamiliar feelings of anxiety and doubt. There had been other school shootings, of course. But Columbine--the name itself quickly settled into the lexicon--tapped far more deeply into a lurking fear that even during these unprecedented good times something might be going wrong with the nation's kids.
What troubled Americans about Columbine was the combination of the extraordinarily willful viciousness of the massacre and the very ordinary middle-classness of its perpetrators and its setting. One could explain violence in inner-city schools: poverty and urban crime had been intertwined since the days of Dickens's London. And, though no one might say it out loud, many Americans could pass over a school shooting in Jonesboro, Arkansas, or West Paducah, Kentucky, without too much comment. The folk in the hills and hollers, Mark Twain taught the nation, can sometimes be a little irrational.
Read the complete article at the City Journal website.