Wendell Berry writes “Against Killing Children” in The Christian Century

A powerful essay from Wendell Berry in The Christian Century this week. A taste:

I want to address a problem, in fact a disaster, that I have not heretofore said enough about: our destruction of children. We of the United States of America have now grown accustomed to the killing of children. We still regard it as sensational, with a remnant revulsion; it is often a “news item.” But sensation wears out fast. The roving eyes of the media hesitate a due moment over the current sensation and hurry on to the next. Perhaps experts may devote an article or column to the matter, but they also must hurry on, for disasters continue to happen, child killing is only one of them, and all must be given their moment in the schedule of sensations.

We all agree that we are living in an exceedingly troubled time, and it finally occurs to me that we ought to think of child killing not as a part or a symptom but instead as the center, the nucleus, the very eye of our trouble: the plainest measure of our betrayal of what we used to call our humanity. I know that I am drawn to this labor by my tenderness and fear for my four great-granddaughters. But I am drawn to it also because I was once a child, and like many children of my generation, I enjoyed a freedom that has become rare, almost extinct. The best part of my early education was the free, unsupervised playing and rambling with other children in our small towns and the freedom to wander in fields and woods. We were to a degree endangered, of course, by the world’s native hazards and our inexperience, but we acquired experience, too, the kind of experience that supervision excludes, and thus something in the way of caution.

Today in our not very free country, children are first in line to be unfree. They are enclosed in specialized child worlds constructed for them by frightened and mostly absent adults. And yet they are in danger, now not so much from nature and accident as from an industrial instrument made expressly for death-dealing, wielded against them by an irate or maddened gunslinger. They are not safe in their schools, and if not there then obviously not in any public place.

You can read the full essay here.