No Sugar Cube Cure

By TAD BARTIMUS

The children are buried, the flowers are wilted, the lawyers are on retainer. First Amendment watchdogs are ready to pounce as the President pushes his Hollywood pals to tone down media evil in America. The NRA stonewalls, the Brady bunch points fingers. Politicians lob tomatoes at all suggestions which don't come out of their caucus -- ineffectual, say the Democrats; ridiculous, say the Republicans. Every expert has a theory, every pundit a thunderbolt. White noise is louder than ever.

Since Salk, America has developed this sense of entitlement toward the quick fix.

We say we're searching for answers to Columbine High. But are we, really? What we want -- what shocked parents, baffled kids, stumped psychologists and all the rest of us really want is a new polio vaccine. We want a miracle cure for this growing sickness in American life. We want a Jonas Salk for the millennium to lead us out of our stagnant pond of alienation onto high ground where all our children will know the difference between right and wrong and stop scaring the hell out of us.

We don't want to think about how we'll actually get to this shining city on a hill. We just want our new Salk to point us in the direction of THE ONE TRUE WAY and we'll head 'em up and move 'em out, a la Tony Robbins, Pat Robertson, Marianne Williamson and all the other motivational types who offer a panacea for what ails us.

Since Salk, America has developed this sense of entitlement toward the quick fix. Many of us remember those terrible days before 1953 when poliomyelitis struck at random, killing and maiming and destroying lives. There were no answers as to why it happened, no safety anywhere. Then along came Salk and Albert Sabin to vanquish one of America's worst evils with serum-coated sugar cubes and one-second needle pricks.

Now, no matter what our malady, we expect the same cure. We don't want to study Columbine's symptoms nearly 2,000 worldwide web addresses classified as "hate" sites, nearly 6,000 incidents in American schools last year involving weapons, kids between the ages of two and 11 watching more than 1,000 minutes of TV every week. Those warning signs would raise more questions, questions raise issues, and issues require choices. Grownups hate making choices.

Do I go to the gym or stay home and help my son with his multiplication tables? Can I get out of the big meeting 12 hours into my 14-hour work day to go to my daughter's tennis match without my supervisor thinking I'm goldbricking? Should we stay home from the mall Saturday and plant the tree together or just have the yardman do it? What will we talk about at dinnertime if we turn off the TV? And how will we get everybody to sit down together, anyway?

It's easier to wring our hands and keep asking questions than to find real answers. That requires tuning out the white noise to find a quiet, sacred place in which to listen. It means rejecting icons of contemporary life: dumbed-down TV, violent videos, obscene lyrics. Self-gratification would have to take a back seat to familial welfare. We'd have to put work second, parenting first. And mean it.

As long as we keep asking questions, we don't have to change the pace and priorities of our lives. Asking questions -- after the bombs have gone off, the guns have been fired, the children are lost -- is easy. Finding the answers is hard. Salk's epidemic had a common cause. Columbine's sickness and, by extension, America's -- has many. There won't be any serum-coated sugar cubes to cure us. We each have to become our own miracle worker if we hope to save ourselves and our children.

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