Several years ago, I made a decision to stop reading the tabloids. When I say "tabloid," I am referring to most city "news"-papers that are easy to read on the train because they're square, and compact, and won't slap your neighbor in the face with every turn of the page. I stopped reading them because they depressed me. They are full of gloom and doom stories: 5 dead people in an apartment fire, kids killing kids, drunk driving tragedies, rapes in the park, and cops shot. They douse you with section after section of heart-wrenching stories, then try to lighten your load with celebrity gossip and sports scores. So for me, it's a good book, People magazine, or possibly the New York Times (if I could just learn to do that puzzle-like page-folding thing).

Well, one day on my train ride home, with no good book at hand, I made the mistake of picking up a tabloid from the seat next to me. Someone had had their fill of misery, and left it behind for the next sucker to digest. Well I was that sucker. The minute I picked it up I saw that nothing had changed -- still page after page of death and destruction. But this time, what I found particularly shocking was the abundance of stories relating to missing and murdered children. It seems that every single day we hear about the death of yet another child. Last week the body of a missing girl was found in Manhattan's East River. She had disappeared after her mother dropped her off, just one block from her elementary school. A couple weeks before, the bodies of two young sisters were found. They'd been kidnapped, raped and murdered. Some weeks before that an adolescent boy's body was found after his community launched one of the most extensive searches in the history of missing persons. Then there are the more familiar cases of child murder: Polly Klaas, Megan Kanka, and Jon Benet Ramsey. Children are being raped and murdered all over this country, every day, maybe several times a day, and nobody seems to know what to do about it. That's why the woman from Denmark who left her baby outside a restaurant, unattended, should thank the city of New York for removing her child from a potentially life threatening situation.

With each new horror story, I find myself getting angrier and angrier because not only is violence against children escalating but it's becoming commonplace -- familiar to the point of being accepted as just another aspect of a cruel society. Worst of all, no one seems to be asking why. Is it just reported more often now? Have children always been murdered at this rate? Or are there more "sickos" on the earth now than ever before? We can't blame the carelessness of parents especially when their children are invited over to a neighbor's house to pet a puppy; or are stolen from a bedroom window during a slumber party; or dropped off just one block away from school for that matter.

When I was a kid, I walked myself to, and from, school everyday. I was always told never to accept candy from strangers, and certainly never to get into a stranger's car. Occasionally we would all be sent home from school with 3-page pamphlets for our parents explaining the do's and don'ts of child safety. I remember the biggest problem around our elementary school was flashers -- dirty, old guys who flashed their private parts at kids as they walked home from school. That was scary enough. We were taught to turn and run away, either to a neighbor's house, back to school, or to the nearest adult. The police would come and question the kids and then patrol the area looking for the guy. That's the closest these "sickos" ever got to my world. If only, now, it was so easy.

How can schools, parents, and police protect kids when they are stolen from the places once believed to be safe? The neighbor across the street could be a killer; the nearest adult could be a killer; and you can be snatched from the safest place in the world -- your very own bed, in your very own home. Nobody holds kids for ransom anymore. That's the stuff of fiction. Money is not the object. They steal children to brutalize them while fulfilling their own sick sexual appetites. What has made the perverts go from flashing, to killing, at such an extensive rate? Has our society somehow projected a message that gives the go-ahead to psychos because we don't know how to protect our children? Or are our prisons so full that we can't lock away the offenders when they are just fledgling flashers?

It's very easy for me to become overwhelmed by all these horrific stories because I have a strong disposition toward bitterness and cynicism. It takes every ounce of strength for me not to believe that the world is a cesspool of stupidity, hatred, and violence, and one of the things that never ceases to pull me from the mire is the company of children. Their honesty, their silliness, their incessant curiosity and quest for knowledge are strong reminders to me that there actually is goodness in the world. As I watch kids discover new things, asking hundreds of questions about things that we, the old, all-knowing grown-ups, have learned to take for granted, I am always reminded that the joy of innocence is never all that far away. The trust, and forgiveness, that we've lost as adults, but that comes so naturally to children, is a treasure --a delicate, fragile, precious treasure that should be collectively protected. The thought of one of those little smiles changing to a look of fear or to a twisted grimace of pain; or that happy laughter turning to unanswered screams, is too unconscionable to bear.

When a child disappears, I don't think anyone expects to see that child reunited to the safety of a parent's protective arms. We just wait for the next report about where the body was found. And with each body found, a little piece of all of us dies with that child, because we lose the faith, the laughter, and the innocence that children bring back to our busy, overwhelming, and sometimes sad lives. If we keep losing our children, what do we have left to live for? There's an old phrase, and I'm not sure who originally coined it but it goes something like this: when society kills their leaders, they destroy themselves, when they kill their prophets, they destroy their souls. I'd like to add to that saying with: when society kills its children, they destroy innocence. The slaughter of America's children is everyone's problem. Like in the movie "Network," we should all stick our heads out the window and scream that we're not going to take it anymore. I don't know what good that would do, but maybe it would change our message of pessimistic acceptance.

When I think of all the monsters that hurt, scar, and kill children, the anger in me says we should put them to death by lethal injection, electric chair, hanging, or whatever means available. The fury in me says to make them suffer the same kind of torture that they inflicted on their victims. The side of me that doesn't believe in the death penalty, but sees some vindication in "an eye for an eye" says put the child-killers in a cold, desolate place, where all they can see is darkness, all they can feel is sorrow, and all they can hear is the echo of a screaming child that fills their waking moments and haunts their sleepless nights -- after all isn't this exactly the legacy they've inflicted on the parents of the children they've killed?