For if you know who could hear you

You know what you would get"

-- lyrics by Colum Sands

The barbarians are not at the gate. They are among us.

I reach this conclusion through observation of a confluence of disparate events this past week.

First was the sad state of affairs that forced Undersheriff Rod Jett to call a news conference to denounce the "no snitch" culture so common among youngsters. "Don't buy into the hype," Jett said, urging witnesses to come forward and help find the person who shot and wounded a Western High School student walking home from school, the third such shooting near a school in just more than a week.

Though an arrest was made based on identification by some of the participants in a street brawl that preceded the shooting, quotes in the Review-Journal from various teens that day showed just how pervasive the "no snitch" creed has become.

Typical of the comments were those of one female Western High freshman, expressed in urban argot: "It went around school today that if somebody says the name, they're gonna get murked. That means shot."

Whether out of fear or fealty, such a stance is tantamount to being an accessory after the fact -- a person, though not present at the commission of a crime, who aids or abets a fugitive from justice. That includes silence.

To knowingly allow such punks to continue to roam the streets is an act of cowardice and is an invitation for further violence against innocents. Yes, there is a chance that "snitching," the pejorative assigned the act by the criminal class, might include a potential element of personal danger. But is that any more hazardous than allowing thugs armed with gangsta attitudes and handguns to cruise our streets looking for the next fight to pick when they are "dissed"?

Somehow we need to convince youngsters that the right and brave thing to do in a civilized society is speak up, even if it is no more than reporting to authorities what rumors are circulating, because often they contain a germ of truth.

The second sad revelation was the latest study to reveal the abysmal lack of knowledge of history and literature among America's 17-year-olds.

The study by Frederick Hess, titled "Still at Risk: What Students Don't Know, Even Now," comes 25 years after the landmark federal government report on our education system titled "A Nation at Risk."

That report famously concluded, "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. ... We have ... unilateral educational disarmament."

Hess found we are still disarmed a quarter century after that alarm was sounded.

After giving 1,200 17-year-olds 33 multiple-guess questions (meaning that on some questions you could score 25 percent by simply guessing), Hess found:

-- Only 43 percent could correctly guess that the Civil War occurred sometime between 1850 and 1900.

-- Only half could guess the purpose of The Federalist Papers was to gain ratification of the Constitution.

-- A mere two-thirds could answer that the guarantees of freedom of speech and religion are found in the Bill of Rights.

-- Only 38 percent guessed that Chaucer wrote the "Canterbury Tales."

-- Only 45 percent could pick out that Oedipus is the character in the Greek play who kills his father and marries his mother.

It is the role of education to convey society's norms and knowledge to the next generation. It is the role of the press to monitor society and sound a warning when things are amiss.

And if I hear one more person piously proclaim this generation is the hope of the future ... well, I'll slap them with Nietzsche, "In reality, hope is the worst of all evils, because it prolongs man's torments."

Actually, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story pretty well summed up the current state of affairs in his 1833 "Commentaries on the Constitution:"

"Without justice being freely, fully, and impartially administered, neither our persons, nor our rights, nor our property, can be protected ... and men may as well return to a state of savage and barbarous independence."

Ignorant barbarians at that.

Thomas Mitchell is editor of the Review-Journal and writes about the role of a free press and free speech. He may be contacted at 383-0261 or via e-mail at tmitchell@reviewjournal.com.