EVERYTHING
FOR YOUR FAMILY
Editor's Note
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It was a tough 24 hours. On the evening news, images of the slaughter at Virginia Tech left me awed and distressed. I pulled my 13-year-old son downstairs to watch some of the eyewitness accounts. I told my 9-year-old twins to stay upstairs and play. The next morning, I attended an Orange County Child Abuse Prevention Center breakfast meeting (see Family News, this issue); I am on the Business Advisory Board. The nonprofit brightfutures4kids.org is, if nothing else, direct. And I admire the organization for this. The meetings tell it like it is, and, sadly, the truth is that many little children are abused. Sometimes, as the photos were shown in a PowerPoint presentation, abuse is played out to the extreme. Let's put it this way: The day's headline in the Los Angeles Times read: "33 die in campus massacre." Our breakfast headline could have been what the center's executive director, Scott Trotter, duly noted: "This is hard work." And painful to watch and to hear. Which brought me back to Virginia Tech, and the announcement that the man who killed 32 people in the worst gun rampage in modern U.S. history was a student. Cho Seung-Hui, 23, was a South Korean and 15-year U.S. resident wrapping up his senior year as an English major. He was identified as the shooter in a dorm in which two died, and as the fatalistic attacker in the hallways of that university. And now his name will live in infamy, much like the duo who killed 13 at Columbine some eight years ago. So, as I sat listening to the breakfast presentation, and looking at the slide show of one abused child after another, a comment by the presenter caught hold. "The apple doesn't fall far from the tree; abuse begets abuse," said Dr. Frederic Bruhn, medical director for the county-run Child Abuse Services Team (CAST). We may learn a lot about the shooter, and we may discover that he was a loved child who went bad. Whatever his case - loved, hated, embraced, abandoned - we shouldn't forget the lesson of why it's important to reach out to the community - and help those parents who need a step up - so that good kids don't turn bad, or that bad kids can be made whole. "Go home," a friend had told me on my cell phone a few hours before the evening news. "Be with your kids." There the two of us sat. "Why did he do that?" my 13-year-old asked. Chatty daddy, that's me. I couldn't utter a word. Craig Reem Executive Editor |
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