We're Scaring Our Children to Death

by Peggy Noonan - April 27th, 2007 - Wall Street Journal (opinionjournal.com)

We are scaring our children to death. Have you noticed this? And we're doing it more and more.

Last week of course it was Cho Seung-hui, the mass murderer of Virginia Tech. The dead-faced man with the famous dead-shark eyes pointed his pistols and wielded his hammer on front pages and TV screens all over America.

What does it do to children to see that?

For 50 years in America, whenever the subject has turned to what our culture presents, the bright response has been, "You don't like it? Change the channel." But there is no other channel to change to, no safe place to click to. Our culture is national. The terrorizing of children is all over.

It seems that the desire of liberals and judges to make children subject to the same environment as adults just keeps rolling on. There was a time when there were different standards for what we could keep from our children. However today, child pornographers are granted absolute right to expose children to sexual pressures and anyone who wants to scare children has an absolute right to do that. Parents have no rights at all.

Children don't even have a right to be safe in our schools. Bullies are guaranteed the right to intimidate and threaten our children and school officials can do absolutely nothing about it since freedom of speech is in the Constitution and freedom from fear is not. Our federal courts are ruled by imbeciles who see no gray area anywhere. Nothing but ABSOLUTE rights that only apply to the most evil in society.