THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, November 3, 1994 TAG: 9411030375
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Marc Tibbs
LENGTH: Medium: 61 lines
All of us should weep with the South Carolina couple whose two young sons have been reported missing now for more than a week.
It's not hard to imagine the emptiness those parents must be feeling.
It's not hard to feel what the mother, Susan Smith, felt when, she says, she was forced from her car at gunpoint while her sons were strapped in their car seats.
It's not hard to envision what those two boys must have felt as the car sped away with a stranger at the wheel and their mother weeping at the side of a South Carolina road.
I'm sure the Maryland woman who was killed last year probably felt the same. She was dragged to her death while clinging to the car that carried her child and the thieves who were speeding away from her driveway.
We should feel like she did: willing to fight with our last breath for the lives of our children.
While we're weeping for Susan Smith and other mothers like her, we should also shed tears for a generation of our own children who have been taken away - taken away by an increasingly callous society, some never to be returned.
A recent study startled many with its findings that more and more students are carrying guns to school, or are likely to know someone who does. More students feel threatened by gun violence, and more of them are experimenting with drugs.
Our kids aren't afraid of dying, and it seems we're not afraid to let them.
Juvenile crime has risen exponentially, and our convenient political solutions are to ``get tough.'' More teens are committing violent crimes, and our feeble answer is either letting them play ``midnight basketball'' or trying to figure out whether we can subject them to the death penalty.
For young people to finish high school, and go on to college and successful careers, has become more the exception than the rule.
Like Susan Smith's children, many of our children are strapped inside a runaway car that is running loose on a road filled with potholes.
We give these ``lost'' children wide berth, afraid to utter a syllable of correction, lest we fall prey to their wrath. Yet the more room we give them, the more room they take.
Their idols have become rap artists, and ex-cons, and mouthy, Hollywood child stars - who have little regard for decency and know less about simple things like speaking when spoken to and respecting your elders.
As old-fashioned as those tenets may sound, they served us well for a few hundred years.
One African proverb holds that ``it takes a community to raise a child,'' yet we live in a world where we can't trust our own neighbors.
So, too, we stand by the roadside, sobbing. MEMO: Got a comment or a complaint? Call Marc Tibbs' INFOLINE number. Dial
640-5555 (245-5555 from the Peninsula) and enter category 6272 (MARC).
by CNB