Our granddaughter decided to run away yesterday afternoon. Her plot was transparent (she’s just finishing kindergarten), and it would have been laughable if one were inclined to chuckle at children’s emotions, . . . but I am not.

In her backpack were three items: a small mylar balloon (the kind they stick into flower arrangements), a silky bag with two band-aids and plastic trinkets, and a collapsible cat—one of those old-style wooden toys with a button on the bottom that causes the tension on a string to loosen and a multi-partite figure to collapse. She took no food, clothes, or coins, and had not thought about which way she might walk once she left our big yard.

Which, of course, she did not do. We watch the kids like hawks, knowing how enthusiastically they cook things up. In addition, her little brother tattled on her before she could get halfway up the driveway. We lured her back with the fact that dinner was nearly on the table, including a choice of watermelon or ginger cookies for dessert.

Still, she smarted at being outed and failing, so to speak, in this grown-up endeavor. Interesting to me was the fact that she was not upset about anything. She just decided she wanted to go somewhere else.

“So, grandma, when will I be old enough to run away?” she asked with marvelous sincerity. Without thinking, I blurted out, “When you have gotten your education, have strong abilities and skills, have a good plan as to what you’re going to do next, and have enough money in your pocket to do it.”

“Oh,” she whispered thoughtfully. Pause. Recognizing she wasn’t going anywhere for a while, she moved her concern to which dessert would be best. After dinner, we stayed with her mom at the table and seriously discussed, once again, the dangers of what happens when children run away, even in a store or at a park. That morbid and distressing conversation never ends, as all parents know. It just gets more descriptive, fueled by the need to convince the child in a developmentally appropriate way of the real dangers out there.

Such talks are one of the hardest jobs for a parent because, in each adult’s mind, there circulates the full knowledge of what lies ahead: the dangerous pressure from peers to do evil, the horrific influences of the Hollywood-created media to support and encourage that evil, and the lure of false promises and instant rewards accompanying these evils that will be dangled before each child hundreds of times, particularly in adolescence. A caring adult cannot but be dismayed at the difficult choices looming in each child’s future.

After this conversation, I began thinking about her wooden toy. It’s actually a figure of a cat that I bought at a craft table in a marketplace in Ljubljana. I remember spending twenty minutes (don’t go shopping with me) trying to decide between a collapsible giraffe, cat, or dog. The giraffe was adorable, but my patient Slovenian vendor cautioned that the neck might break in the suitcase. The dog was boring. The cat won.

Somehow, her wooden cat became a symbol to me of the state of our society now. The mechanisms that ordinarily hold it together seem to be shattering around us, leaving far too many things to dangle formlessly and dangerously. While the obvious solution is to restore the proper mechanism, with whatever repair it may need, the obvious rarely happens in such situations.

Images of chaos and destruction are erupting in ways I never thought possible in America. Anyone who reads history knows that the most egregious accounts of national devastation often start this way. I, like you, hope and pray for the restoration of reason, reality, wisdom, and prudence. My optimism, though, is not as strong as it ordinarily is.

Plus, I cannot stop thinking about the individual young people involved in the violence—something harder to do when a “mob” is involved. I do not pretend to be a social scientist or psychologist. Nor do I intend to justify the least bit of violence. But how can one not think backwards and wonder about the path that led each young person to this point. How many of them came from vastly broken homes? How many of them entered school each morning through ugly security gates to detect weapons? How many of them grew up around the most dissolute of adult behaviors? How many of them . . . well you know the rest. The answer, I fear, is far too many of them.

The work of creating a strong, moral, responsible adult is tedious and time consuming. It used to be well understood that this work ranks as the most important calling of adults in any given society. And what does the work of this calling look like? Let me remind you.

Every time we explain why moving the dishes to the edge of the counter is not the same thing as washing them, or point out that shoes are on the wrong feet, or correct “him and me went fishing,” we are creating a more disciplined and aware future adult. Each time we sing the multiplication tables or ten rounds of “This Old Man,” or curl little fingers into a three-point grip, we are building an adult who is more capable and confident. Each time we read good children’s literature aloud and point out the wisdom in each snippet, we are fostering a more moral adult. And any time we mow the lawn for an elderly neighbor, volunteer at a science fair, or assemble shoeboxes for international causes, we are modeling what it means to be a caring and responsive adult.

Someone must teach a child to create, rather than destroy. Someone must teach patience, discipline, and compassion. Someone must plant the magical words of poetry, proverbs, and hymns to teach the values and virtues of our heritage. And if no one is there to do it, what will replace it?

Moral relativism—long a thread in our Western intellectual history—was brought into popular glory by my generation. We Baby Boomers did not create this concept, but we surely did package it up in pretty ribbons, sell it to ourselves, and dump it on the next generations. It is no longer a trend or even a ticking time bomb. It is an actual bomb that has singed at least two to three generations. Even for those inclined to be optimistic, it is hard to see how the thinking of a young person characterized by a deficit of intellectual education and absence of moral education can be repaired.

Maybe you, like me, read the news obsessively. If so, you may also find it hard turn from these accounts (with all of their misstatements and contradictions) and realign your thoughts to the Truths that actually govern man and the universe. But we must turn to them as ardently as we know how.

The ancient words Goodness, Truth, Beauty, and Virtue resound in the mouths and from the pens of those dedicated to today’s renewal of education. And, most wonderfully, we mean them when we use them. One of the great differences between the empty rhetoric of academia (where I spent the bulk of my adult life) and this vibrant movement is the level of sincerity behind the words used. And not just sincerity! Action. Real action.

The banter of trendy and outraged words which has nearly destroyed academia will never end, I fear. Nor will the waving of rhetorical flag after rhetorical flag, which some in the upper echelons of so-called progressive circles now find wrapped around their own necks, strangling their careers and destroying their personal lives. Why are we surprised? The choice to teach by cutting every root from the bloodied, yet rich, soil of our past while pretending to grow fruit without nourishment cannot but fail, leaving its seedlings to starve.

The advice I give myself, right now, is to stay on task. Be aware, read, and consider everything that is happening. But trust those roots that are trustworthy. And above all, pray to be bathed in the Divine Wisdom that can fill every place and heal every circumstance.

Many of us didn’t expect to see these things happen here—a country that, despite flaws and failings, has offered more people more good than has been achieved in any other land in the world. That is the takeaway children once understood from their public schooling. And from their churches and synagogues. And from their families, civic clubs, and neighbors.

That is not the takeaway that the children-now-adults throwing bricks got. I do not know the full solution for changing their hearts and minds—certainly not until the button of tension is released and the figures can stand straight again. But I do know that we who have confidence in the values of our Western heritage must stay on task. We must teach and learn ourselves with even more ardor, creativity, and discipline, for it is going to be needed.