Some years ago I was watching a TV series entitled “Life Goes On.” The following is an excerpt from one chapter of my book “Birds With Broken Wings” and I want to share this with others who have not read the book:

    TV Guide lists Life Goes On as #1 among the 10 top shows recommended for Teens. Quote: “Parents that struggle, kids that cope, and believable love.” And it is Kellie Martin, largely, who makes it believable. But such believability is only achieved through the vulnerability of genuinely caring about others; no matter how masterful the actor or actress, this is not something that can be learned as a craft; it is either there or it is not.

    And, so, I fear for Kellie, as I do for Karrie, my remaining little angel, as someone who has that rare and precious gift of really caring. And because of this, they are vulnerable to the evil that men do and those eyes betray their love to those that would take advantage as well as to those who would return that love in kind.

    But to attempt to describe the un-describable? I cannot. I can place flowers on the nightstand of my Lady, I can try, with all my powers, to describe my feelings to her, I can do the thankless and grimy tasks of day-to-day living and punching a clock as expressions of my love, but if those eyes of innocent trust and wonder and unreserved giving like the eyes of Diana, Karen, and Kellie are missing I soon realize, as it continues to play itself out, it is all in vain.

    Damned by an age which despises those like Scott and Cooper, the art of language, hopes, dreams and ideals of true love and true romance, our young people have been cheated of the most precious thing of all: the ability to give and receive pure, unselfish love, love that sacrifices without any sense of sacrifice this having been betrayed and traded for unbridled lust where our young girls are the predominant victims, an age where we are learning, more and more, that our young girls are preyed upon by even those of their own families! How willing I would be to put the rope around the neck of any that would betray the trust of a child in such a fashion! These monstrous bullies, these maimers and cripplers of innocence cannot be human beings! They are beasts; devouring, unclean, predatory, destroying monsters in human guise and should be treated as such!

    As I began to face up to what Kellie had opened in my own soul which I thought had been successfully buried, the question was what to do about it? For several days I struggled with the question. I know nothing and everything about Kellie Martin. It's what I know of genuine love and romance, what I know from her eyes as that of my own daughters that truly counts about Kellie, that makes me fearful for her and all the Kellies she represents. Certainly my girls have been the recipients of the thoughts of their father. But, how many times did I fail to warn those thousands of teenagers I was entrusted with in the schools? Now, having seen Diana's eyes once again in Kellie I had to at least try to do something about it.

    Diana was killed in a motorcycle accident after having been married less than a year. She lay in a coma for several days. My son Daniel, Diana’s brother and I would sit by her side, reading and praying, hoping against hope that she would come out of it. But it wasn't to be. She slipped quietly away from us without ever regaining consciousness.

    Kellie's eyes are those of my daughter Karen's as well. But Karen has been hurt and betrayed so much in her young life, seeking love and fulfillment that she is beginning to lose the open, wonder-filled, pure, honest, trusting elements of these wells and windows of the soul. People who care as much as Diana, Karen, and Kellie can never hide what they really feel; their eyes betray them. I grieve to see in Karen's eyes the increasing knowledge of an evil world of selfish, using and abusing, people.

    Are we now a society for which genuine love and romance are anachronistic, a harking back to simpler times where the search for such was not an exercise in quixotic futility? I will not have it so! Not as long as there are girls like Kellie, not as long as there are daughters like Diana and Karen who can truly love their fathers and evoke the purest love in the universe in the hearts of those fathers!

    I'll never forget the time I took Karen out for our very first grown-up dinner together. She was only seventeen, but she was breathtakingly beautiful! It was nearly impossible to believe this beautiful girl/woman was my own daughter, the little girl I use to tumble with, cuddle, tease and tickle.

    I had made reservations for the dinner at one of the finest restaurants in the area. Every eye in the place was on us. I was bursting with pride that my little girl was pleased to let her daddy show her off, and show her off I did. Now you just can't do this with your sons. A father has an altogether different relationship with sons. As they grow up, they become men in their own right; but those little angels? Never! They will never become women; they will always be Daddy's Little Girl.

    Karrie (she will never be Karen to her dad) couldn't possibly have known the turmoil of my own thoughts as we sat in this fashionable restaurant and I savored every moment of this precious time together. I wanted to capture it forever, indelibly, on my heart and soul, to have it there for recall when the shadows of life began to lengthen, when she would move into her own sphere of living her own life and dad would recede.

    What kind of men are the fathers of all these girls who sell out their dreams of a good man so cheaply? And all these young men who treat girls so shabbily, what are their fathers teaching them? What redeeming note can be sounded for a culture which treats its children in such a fashion, leaving them without their right to dream and hope? (End)

As I contemplate the foregoing written a few years ago and the shadows of my life have grown quite long, I now live with the loss of my other little angel, Karrie. The grief never departs for the loss of both of my little angels; such grief is profound beyond any words as those who have suffered such a loss can testify. The point I want to make here is that today’s America seems to actually hate children. We do not cherish them, and a nation that fails to cherish its young has no future! Nor does it deserve one!