This is an opinion column.

I don’t think I ever really wanted to hurt anybody before, but when my son told me where his hiding place was in his classroom, for a second, I wanted to hurt everybody.

Such is the feeling when you realize the world doesn’t care about the safety of your child.

Such is the futility of that anger when you know there’s nothing you can do personally and nothing anyone else will do collectively.

We’ve decided to live with the constant threat of death, and there’s no getting comfortable with that.

But I didn’t really understand any of that until I had a kid in school.

I didn’t grow up with this. I was the last child of the Cold War. Columbine happened when I was in college. We grew up with the background threat of global annihilation, which despite all the saber-rattling, never came to fruition. Not yet, anyway.

Those kids who came after me, now including my own, have learned to hide under desks and closets, not to protect themselves from some hypothetical attack by a foreign foe, but real, bloody mass murders we can now set our clocks by.

And we have done nothing.

It was inevitable our indifference would have downstream effects. Before yet another school shooting took over the news cycle on Monday, a Wall Street Journal-NORC poll had been making the rounds.

Americans’ sentiments about America, it showed, were not what they used to be.

The poll measured what values Americans considered important to them and tracked changes over time.

“Patriotism” stood at 38 percent, down from 70 percent in 1998.

“Religion” dropped from 62 percent to 39 over the same time.

Community involvement had a bump until a few years ago, but has fallen from 62 percent to 27 percent in just a few years.

What “value” increased?

Money. Young folks understand that money is important.

Perhaps most troublesome of all — only 30 percent of respondents said having children was important to them.

I understand the reluctance. And as much as I believe family life is fulfilling, I can understand, too, the appeal of not having to worry about a new closest loved one.

A lot of folks I saw sharing the poll seemed to think it a sign of the younger generation’s failure, and people smarter than me have questioned its methodology.

But even if it’s cooked, who would blame the kids if they did feel that way?

Just turn on your TV.

How do you convince a generation they should love a country that doesn’t love them?

When public officials share Christmas cards featuring their gun collections, how do we get off telling children they’re better with religion?

How do we expect our kids to believe in “community involvement” when our communities have shown them inexhaustible indifference?

We teach our children to crouch in the dark corners of their classrooms but they’re not the ones who’ve been hiding.

If it sounds like I’ve lost hope, though, I haven’t.

Because we have inadvertently taught our children an important lesson we never learned: That gun violence is terrifying and that the so-called grown-ups can’t be trusted to do anything about it.

It’s not that those young folks in that polling and others like it have lost hope. Rather, they recognize problems.

And that’s the first qualification for fixing them.

They won’t be hiding under their desks forever. One day they’ll come out from under there. Many already have.

And they’ll have the courage to take on the challenges we’ve been hiding from all their lives.

More columns by Kyle Whitmire

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