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

A powerful essay by Wendell Berry in The Christian century this week. A foretaste:

I want to address a problem, a catastrophe actually, that I haven't talked about enough: our destruction of children. We in the United States of America have become accustomed to the killing of children. We still regard it as sensational, with a modicum of disgust; it is often “news”. But the sensation quickly wears off. The roving eyes of the media pause for a moment at the current sensation and then rush to the next. Perhaps experts will dedicate an article or a column to this topic, but they must also hurry, because disasters continue to happen, child killings are just one of them, and all of them must have their place in the list of sensations.

We all agree that we are living in extremely troubled times, and finally it occurs to me that we should look at infanticide not as a part or a symptom, but as the center, the core, the real eye of our problem: the clearest one Measure of our betrayal of what we used to call our humanity. I know that my tenderness and my fear for my four great-granddaughters draw me to this work. But I'm also drawn to it because I was once a child and, like many children of my generation, enjoyed a freedom that has become rare, almost extinct. The best part of my early education was the free, unsupervised play and hiking with other children in our small towns and the freedom to wander through fields and forests. We were, of course, vulnerable to some degree by the natural dangers of the world and our inexperience, but we also gained experience, the kind of experience that precludes supervision, and therefore something like caution.

Today, in our not very free country, children are the first to be unfree. They are trapped in special children's worlds created for them by frightened and mostly absent adults. And yet they are in danger, not so much from nature and accident, but from an industrial instrument made specifically for death agony, used against them by an angry or insane gunfighter. They are not safe in their schools, and if not there, then of course not in any public place.

You can read the full essay here.