Parents have railed against shelters near schools, but no one has made any connection between the crazed consumerism of our kids and their elders' cold unconcern toward others. Maybe the homeless are not the only ones who need to spend time in these places to thaw out.

what we call things matters. ... The words we use, and how we perceive those words, reflect how we value, or devalue, people, places, and things.

By the time you kill and mount what you catch, it has lost that very thing that made it worth having. I knew this only as a vague sense of disappointment at age 10; not until later did I recognize it as a metaphor for much of life.

Uncontrollable consumerism has become a watchword of our culture despite regular and compelling calls for its end. The United States has more malls than high schools; Americans spend more time shopping than reading. ... Some of the most insightful writing about the American character over the nation's history has been about neither freedom nor democracy but about the crazed impulse to acquire things.

This is how I learn most of what I know about my children and their friends: by sitting in the driver's seat and keeping quiet.

Kids and violent TV, violent TV and violence, violence and kids. The only people missing from this discussion are the parents. Where are we? Gone. Abdicated.

We almost manage to forget that things happen that we don't anticipate.