In today's world awash with violence and hatred, no one is suffering more than our children. They have become the collateral damage of the shadow side of our American character. Sociologists today speak of a lost generation.
Psychologists talk about children who are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Educators and parents see children whose defining attitude is nihilism, children who sense that it doesn't matter what they do because they won't live long enough to suffer the consequences. Watching them grow up in fearful and dehumanizing circumstances, we find it too painful to predict the individual and social repercussions of raising children who measure human worth in terms of their ability to obtain weapons or escape accountability for their actions. Individually, every parent and educator is concerned about his or her child's future. But when we bring together people of different races or cultures to reach agreement about how to ensure the worth of that future, denial, hostility and fear of diversity continue to destroy the chances we have to create it, as they lay the foundation for more physical and emotional killing. Contrary to what the neo-conservative talk show hosts would have us believe, multiculturalism is not the force that is threatening our unity.