THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 26, 1995 TAG: 9502230162
SECTION: CAROLINA COAST PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
SOURCE: Ron Speer
LENGTH: Medium: 74 lines
Quick, run and hug your kids. Tell them you love them.
Tell them WHY you love them. Hug them again.
Take them for a walk. Show your son how to make cookies. Show your daughter how to fly a kite. Shoot some baskets with them both.
Read them a story. Listen while they read you a story.
Show them how to fix their bikes. Ask them about their dreams. Ask them about their fears.
Tell them about your dreams. Share with them your fears.
Then get on the phone and call your folks and let them know that despite their foibles you think they're swell. Write grandma and grandpa and tell them how they've brightened your life.
Now take a look around. And say a little prayer of thanks that no matter how bad life may be, we've all probably got something to be thankful about.
A lot of people on the Outer Banks have already shown their appreciation for their blessings by taking flowers to commemorate three little kids whose dreams will never come true.
The people who placed flowers where the kids died at their father's hand in Kill Devil Hills moved me more than anything else in a very troubling week for most of us on the Outer Banks.
The flower-bearers were the only bright spot in a dark week of wondering.
The victims of the tragedy were total strangers, from a small town in Delaware, here only by fate it seems. But a couple of dozen familes made them welcome, even in death.
We're a welcoming people, most of us who live in the small towns and communities of northeast North Carolina.
We take in strangers mostly for pay, but we take them in, too, out of kindness.
And I think we all would have delighted in somehow finding a home for those three kids caught in confusing world of grown ups.
And we ask why? Why? Why?
That's all many of us could think about for the past few days. Why would any parent see this as a solution? Why would a civilized human of modern times do something no pagan of the past would dream of doing?
Why? Why? Why?
We've been asking that question of friends and of strangers for a week, and we'll be asking why in church this morning, many of us.
But maybe we ought to ask: What? Maybe we ought to ask: How?
Maybe we ought to ask: When?
What can we do to stop the madness?
How can we keep the people we know from committing the horrible acts committed here by a stranger?
When will we do something that might help?
We might start, I think, by being better neighbors. Are we there when a neighbor hurts? Do we really know our neighbors, even in the small towns and communities of the Albemarle?
We might ask - in this busy world in which we struggle to survive - if we save enough time for the children we brought into the world, and do we use that time to drdaw our family closer?
We might ask ourselves if we give adequate support to the agencies that do help the troubled and the angry and the paranoid and the ill? Do we take our turn at making sure the troubled have a listener who maybe can keep them from going beserk?
We might ask our political leaders whether the problems of the troubled (which are our problems, too) will be helped or worsened if we cut back on public spending on behalf of the afflicted?
Then we might go back and assure our children that to us they are special, and that what happened last week in Kill Devil Hills was an aberration.
And ask them if they'd rather shoot baskets, fly a kite or bake some cookies. by CNB