TRAIN THEM | BEFORE THEY BECOME ADULTS

In 1999, two otherwise normal looking young adults of age seventeen and eighteen years old raised through a High School in the United States of America killing in cold blood twelve students and one teacher. America was shocked and remains in shock, at the gruesome display of raw, naked evil. These normal looking boys who were admirers of Hitler, just enjoyed killing. “Do you believe in God?” one of them asked a girl. When she said yes, he asked why but never gave her a chance to answer. He fired point-blank into her face.

Some years back in the area of Benin City, Nigeria, I saw a group of little kids less than 15 years of age chasing a child their age with weapons (knives, machetes, battle axe) promising to kill him when they catch him. Wanted to interfere, but was told that they belonged to a gang (cult). 

Two clean-cut kids in Arkansas (USA) who looked like “the kids next door” took up positions outside the school, rang the fire alarm to get students running outside the school compound. With guns in their hands, they acted like snipers, gunning down their classmates filing out of the school.

Two children, one a ten-year-old and the other an eleven-year-old, admitted dropping a five-year-old from the fourteenth floor window of a Chicago housing project, because the five-year-old refused to steal candy.

Two teenage boys in New Jersey ordered a pizza. When the deliveryman arrived, they killed him in cold blood, leaving the pizzas uneaten. “They just wanted to see and feel what it would be like to kill somebody,” explained a law enforcement official after interviewing them. A wave of similar crimes occured thereafter.

Two New York City teenagers , one from a wealthy family and attending a fashionable school, for no apparent reason killed a stranger walking through Central Park. Then they disemboweled him (removed the contents of his stomach), disfigured his face, and left him floating in a pond in the park. Probably you've read William's Golding's modern classic Lord of the Flies: this is the story coming live in our midst. Could nice, civilized young boys who were products of good schools become mere animals? That was the question and the answer, sadly, is yes. 

A few years ago, Melissa Drexler, while attending her high school prom (a formal dance held at a high school or college near the end of the academic year), excused herself from her boyfriend to go to the washroom, where in a few minutes she gave birth to a child she has carried in her womb for nine months. She then straightened out her dress, washed her hands, put the baby in a sack and dropped him in a trash bin. Rejoining her boyfriend, she asked the orchestra to play her favourite song, which happened to be entitled “Unforgiven.” She danced away the rest of the evening like nothing happened, seeming to enjoy herself, classmates reported, and she seemed really surprised when she was arrested. 

The sad conclusion one must draw from the cases related, and many, many others, is that we have simply failed in this most basic task of civilizing society through inattention to the moral and spiritual development of our children. The result is a generation with suppressed and deadened consciences. Many of our young people act like savage children, lacking any human characteristic decency, respect for life, and concern (if not compassion) for others. Many young people have lost it seeing no difference between operating a video game and thrill-killing a pizza deliveryman or a bystander on the street. In fact, video games are similar to military training in one very chilling respect: Both train people to shoot and kill lifelike characters, thereby dismantling the natural human disinclination to kill another human being. The difference, of course, is that soldiers absorb this training in a moral context that also stresses love of country, devotion to comrades, and compassion toward the helpless; video games, on the other hand, and the street culture that they reflect and reinforce revere none of those values. 

This disregard for human life and dignity cannot be dismissed as just another social phenomenon: it is a huge, gaping crack in the foundation of civilized society. It threatens our very survival. It is a reminder that we are in the end of the end times. It is a reminder that our parents are failing and not paying enough attention (physically, morally and spiritually) to their children. It is a reminder of a deteriorating world as foretold in the Bible, but we cannot fold arms and watch our children destroy themselves and our society collapse. That is why we the The Global Church Watch will be unveiling to us steps we can take to restore order in the lives of our children and young adults out there in the street as revealed in Charles Colson's book: Justice That Restores.