Never forget.

• Author: Lewis, David
• Position: Corporate contributions to the prevention of violence - Editorial

April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, the poet wrote. And May didn't get much better. Now it's June. Let's pray for change, and let's remember to be careful what we pray for.

Never forget.

Never again.

These were the two nevers we all promised ourselves after the Columbine murders, and how are we doing so far?

Of course "never" can't always be "never." Time goes on. Life goes on. Time and Life. That's a joke. See? We are easily distracted. New tragedies claim our attention. "22 Killed in Mother's Day Crash." Does anybody know how many died in those Oklahoma tornadoes?

This is a business magazine, and big, big business is going on. AT&T: One hundred-and-twenty-one-point-nine-billion. There's a number. Lockheed: five mission failures, one CEO. You can't ignore it.

And we're at war. That's distracting, failing in an undeclared war.

Right now, as you read this, part of your brain is saying, "This is old news. Why is he going on like this?" I wonder, too.

Old patterns prevail. At best we are fickle. I'm as bad as you. Worse. I watched television, remote control in hand, the Sunday afternoon the Columbine faculty and students held their Red Rocks memorial.

I switched between Channel 4 and Channel 9, both showing the memorial, then started surfing. There it was, over on Channel 20: "Universal Soldier," with Dolph Lundgren and Jean-Claude Van Damme, a futuristic beefcake shoot-'em-up and gore-fest.

Later, I found a website that listed Lundgren's "memorable lines" in his role as the elite commander "Scott":

* Scott: "I'm all ears!"

* Scott: "Traitor."

Snappy, huh?

"Universal Soldier" is that video game, "Doom," in the flesh.

I watched it for a few minutes, then switched back to the Columbine Memorial.

So there you go, our Death Culture. Death Culture takes no holidays.

So we are none of us without sin. So what. We all know that. That's not the point. The point is we're over here and those two boys are over there, in the black pit of murder and suicide.

Maybe we can't see into that black pit - we know so little about ourselves. Maybe we just dip a toe in sometimes. Maybe someday somebody will come up with an explanation for the young man from the black room and his sidekick.

Maybe we admit we are humbled in the face of their awful knowledge, and our awful ignorance.

But we don't need to understand it all for some little bit of good to come out...