KINDER'S COMMENTARY: LOOKING FOR A RESPONSE TO THE QUESTION: WHAT ARE YOU DOING?

Ten months ago, this writer responded to a letter from a constituent who was horrified at the rash of school shootings cropping up across the country and wanted to know what we lawmakers had done to address school safety for her children.

First I noted the Safe Schools Act of 1995 and sent her a copy of the law. Also enclosed was a copy of a column by James Glassman, a nationally syndicated columnist, who argues that media obsession may actually be feeding the phenomenon and that schools remain safe by and large. Further, I observed that the boy out in Oregon (then the outrage du jour) had signaled "that he was a time bomb about to detonate."

Fast forward to the last awful week in Littleton, Colo. What kind of school authorities and parents ignore a self-selected gang of sullen boys wearing black trench coats in all weather, while spouting racial insults as they devotedly worship Adolf Hitler and play ever-more-violent computer games?

Recall the chilling wisdom of G.K. Chesterton: That when men cease to believe in God, they "don't then believe in nothing." Rather, said Chesterton, they will then, "... believe in anything."

It wasn't long before that letter, by this not-very-poetic writer, was resorting to poetry:

Oh, how small of all that human hearts endure

The part that laws or kings can cause or cure.

-- Samuel Johnson

The point is of course the limits of human lawmaking and how, I wrote, "... many of our most serious problems won't admit of a legislative solution. But it seems the more we ignore God's laws, and those written on the human heart, the more we demand a flood of lawmaking out of the General Assembly."

The late, great Malcolm Muggeridge saw it all coming years ago, these consequences of our wholesale abandoning of God and his natural law. So did the greatest poet of the 20th century, T.S. Eliot. Asked decades ago what he foresaw for the future of Western civilization, Eliot responded, with awful foresight: "People killing each other in the streets."

I commended to my correspondent the work of Dr. James Dobson of "Focus on the Family," who, I wrote, is "... fighting as hard as he can to awaken our fellow countrymen to what is at stake in the war for control of our culture and for our children."

Finally, in closing, I resorted to the rueful wisdom of one of the 20th century's most influential writers:

"We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and then bid the geldings to be fruitful."

-- C.S. Lewis, "The Abolition of Man"

No careful reader of the Bible, nor student of the Judeo-Christian tradition, could be surprised that fathomless evil on this scale lurks inside the human heart. I fear the road back will be long and hard and littered with more bodies of the innocent.

Pray.

Pray hard.

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.