Sweet Child 'O Mine

Warning: Tirade, Dead Ahead.

I spent the weekend with 563 kids, and I'm tired.

It wasn't a mega slumber party (though my oldest would have loved that it was). I simply had the opportunity to stand back and watch them as they toiled and sweat and stretched their imagination to the farthest limits at my community group's annual coloring contest.

I was, as I always am, amazed at their uniqueness and ripe, distinctive personalities. Yet I was equally stunned by how similar a 4-year-old from one town, background or status is to another that comes from a very different world. Kids, thank God, are just kids.

And I couldn't help but think about Katrina's kids, 372,000 of them students, now displaced and doing their best to attempt normalcy in various states around the country. I closed my eyes and wished with all my might that they could sit right there and color with us, and I thought how deeply precious that kind of innocent pleasure truly is.

It's not just Katrina causing my pause, however. This story about a poor baby being stabbed in New York last week, and this one about children locked in cages has officially turned my melancholy into an animal fury.

Not to mention the recent data on children starving in Africa, which is exponentially more depressing.

I'm not a total idiot. I do understand survival of the fittest, and the concept that to a certain degree the weakest of a species will invariably suffer. But in our species, and in our society, aren't we better than that? Hasn't evolution given us the tools to change that course?

Maybe not, but short of locking them in the house and home schooling until they're 30 (not an option for me, especially where trigonometry factors in) I'm afraid I'm going to hope for a healthy dose of good luck. In fact, I'm counting on it.