By;Mar-Vic Cagurangan
Variety News staff

THE whole world was shocked when the gun-wielding duo, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, walked into the campus of Columbine High School and started shooting scores of students before killing themselves. A series of similar events has since followed elsewhere, creating a growing catalog of unimaginable cases of violence involving wicked little monsters. Add the senseless deaths of Guam’s Regina Guzman and Jeromy Newby to the list.
We’re close to becoming immune to those stories and behavioral experts are quick to blame some esoteric and inanimate fall guys, namely, Internet, video games, pop culture, chemical imbalance  or maybe the misalignment of stars, if you will ask the gypsies. 
Sure, we put the blame on a patsy that is incapable of defending itself. What we fail to do is look back and revisit the elements of the past, in which boys and girls were just innocent boys and girls.
In my generation, and the ones before me, we didn’t hear of stories about students brandishing guns and shooting kids in school, or bullies beating up the uncool campus nerds. The worst one student would do is stick a bubblegum on their classmate’s hair, for which  he or she would get the ruler treatment from the teacher.
I belong to the generation in which respect was the cornerstone of behavior. Children didn’t talk back to adults. We had high esteem for our parents and teachers who wouldn’t spare the rod and spoil a child.
In my generation, children were reared by the village. If one saw a neighbor’s child pulling off some mischief, that person could take whatever measures deemed prudent and acceptable. When parents found out about such an episode, the child would have to deal with more hell at home. When we got spanked in school, a supplementary punishment would follow once we got home.
In my generation, policemen were respected. Children would quit misbehaving when the constabulary was present. We were taught the concept of “authority.”
In the best-selling “The Closing of the American Mind,” Allan Bloom notes how parents and teachers have lost the legal and moral authority that they had in the old world.
“They lack self-confidence as educators of their children, generously believing that they will be better than their parents not only in well being but in moral, bodily and intellectual virtue,” Bloom writes. “There is always a more or less open belief in progress, which means the past appear poor and contemptible; the future, which is open ended cannot be prescribed to by parents and it eclipses the past which they know to be inferior.”
The modern adults think of the old ways of punishing misbehavior as inferior. Corporal punishment has thus been abolished in most schools. In the modern times, any form of discipline can be defined as “abuse.” We have given too much leverage to clueless kids by inviting them to press charges against their parents and teachers for even the simplest oral rebuke.
Parents and teachers have forgotten what separates adults from children, having had their authority neutered. We are too prone to treating our progeny as equals. As a  result, we have created spoiled brats and little savages, who  have no sense of rewards and punishment for good and evil, convinced that they can do anything and get away with it.
Call me wicked if you must, but I think revisiting corporal punishment is in order. A simple infliction of pain without injury can teach a lesson. Time has come for us, adults, to reassert our authority and take back the night from our children.
(Send feedback to marvic@mvguam.com)