America is dumbfounded. It isn't just the fact of the school massacre in Littleton, Colorado — sadly, we've seen a whole rash of them in the past year — but all the horrifying details accompanying it.

Two boys in their late teens, old enough to know what they were doing; two normal families, in a normal suburb, near a calm state capital; a close-knit school community, safely past the prom's threat of drunk driving; and now, 12 students and one teacher shot to death, many more sent to the hospital, a double suicide by the murderers, and the revelation of plans to kill hundreds more, blow up the school, and crash a plane into New York City.

Only a movie could get away with a story so bizarre.

Or could it? We Americans have no choice but to ask ourselves, "How did we get to this point? What went wrong with us?" It feels as though this terrible tragedy were a microcosm, a concentrated, macabre expression of all the ills in American society. If we are really going to recover from this shock — and here recovery includes correction and prevention — then we need to look fearlessly into the face of the tragedy and see what it's trying to tell us.

The first question to ask about Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold is, where were their parents? The appalling fact is that these parents were around. A neighbor has called them "utterly, utterly normal" people. Both kids had both parents, still married, working for a living.

Eric's parents got him to join Little League and came to his practices and games — no wellspring of anti-athlete angst there. Dylan's family had just celebrated Passover — so it's unlikely that his admiration of Nazi hate rhetoric came from his home, either.

It's impossible to judge fairly whether or not the parents should have suspected the impending disaster. Maybe they should have noticed the guns in the kids' rooms, or maybe they were trying to be good parents by respecting their kids' privacy. But whatever role they should or should not have played respecting the massacre itself, it is clear that these two boys' psychopathic behavior did not come from home. They did not learn hate from their parents, or gruesome violence, or such blatant disrespect for life.

It is precisely the normalcy of these two families that should make other Americans quake in their boots. For this is the plain truth of it: When the society is sick, the family is not safe from the sickness. Privacy becomes a meaningless concept, because the interaction between family life and community life is fluid and constant. Littleton is proof that parents can't take anything for granted.

Another issue that's getting a lot of political attention is gun control. To zero in on guns as the focal point of this tragedy is to miss the point. The regulation of guns might reduce the actual carnage, but it's not going to deter the sociopathic instinct behind it. The abuse of guns, and the automatic equation of guns with irresponsible personal violence instead of responsible hunting and conservation, is really just another symptom of the sickness of our society.

The question then arises, of course, what is the source of the sickness? Obviously, for these boys, the digital underworld was both extremely seductive and extremely poisonous. Their computer games committed the typical media crime: They glorified violence. That may be a cliché, but a bloodily accurate one.

Those two boys — bright, intelligent boys by all reports — mimicked the lessons of glorified violence all too well: that it's fun, that it's not messy or smelly, that there are no consequences, that every time you "die" you can just get another "life," that fantasy trumps reality, that destruction is heroic. In the gruesome massacre, Eric and Dylan made their computer game come to life, by bringing death to many and to themselves. But in this case there is no "extra life."

The same pattern emerges from their Internet use. The net offers instant contact and zero accountability. Eric found a very sympathetic medium for his own sickness: a quick and easy place to learn how to build pipe bombs, an easel for his drawings of monsters and bones and blood, a forum for meeting like minds who also indulge in hate. That's because the Web is a value-free communication zone, a genie that equally grants the bad wishes along with the good. And being that the net is a part of the media, it is still protected by the First Amendment, regardless of what it produces.

But an open society such as ours only works when there is enough social cohesion to protect itself against detrimental influences. One of the things this tragedy is telling us is that our former social cohesion has dissolved.

Most everyone can differentiate between the indulgence of fantasy and the slower, duller pace of real life. The crossover between the two is not a common occurrence. Simply note how many millions of kids imbibe media violence daily and yet don't react the way Eric and Dylan did. (That still leaves open the question, of course, whether media violence harms kids in other, subtler ways.)

All the same, I strongly doubt that these boys couldn't distinguish between a computer game and real life. They weren't stupid or delusional — in fact, they were so smart and together that they convinced a delinquent diversion program that they had learned the lessons of civic responsibility and self-control. Nor is it entirely accurate to say that these boys were abjectly lacking in conscience altogether. The issue is rather how and by whom their consciences were formed.

What happened is that the two boys in Littleton were raised by American culture in the raw. Eric and Dylan absorbed the one overriding cultural message of our day: Life is not worth very much, if it is worth anything at all.

The Nazis first coined the expression "life not worth living" regarding the sick, disabled, and mentally ill, but take an honest look at America's judgment on life. These boys have lived their entire lives under the verdict of Roe v. Wade, a regime in which inconvenient or defective children can be disposed of: Unborn life is not worth living. In the past several years the euthanasia debate has reared its ugly head, and in the last year it has seen legal approval in Oregon: Sick and painful lives are not worth living. The elderly, even those with healthy adult children to look after them, are put away in nursing homes: Old lives are not worth living. Believers of all stripes are taunted as intolerant, fanatical, incredulous, heartless or brainless: Religious life is not worth living.

If we as a society believe that unborn and sick and elderly life is not worth living, then you don't need a brilliant mind to figure out that eventually no life is worth living, or worth protecting. Life itself ceases to be of value: The only value is what the individual sees in it.

Now take that subtle, insidious message, and pair it up with the merciless culture of consumption that has taken over America. What life are we taught is worth living? Life that is attractive, sexy, wealthy or wears Abercrombie & Fitch, as students at Columbine often did. Life that is athletic, popular and famous.

Imagine: A week ago those two were nobodies. Now their names and faces are broadcast the world over. They've written themselves into history, their one big shot at eternity, the perfect vengeance on all the fashionable types poised for success who had rejected them all their lives. The guns, and the media, and the culture of death did the work of eroding any sense of moral agency in them and made their job a lot easier.

These are the questions, then, that Americans of all ages, not just high schoolers, have to start asking and insisting on honest answers to. How did it get this bad? How did the "jocks" and the "preps" learn that the "nerds" and the "weirdoes" don't deserve their respect? That, as the papers report, it was acceptable to throw mashed potatoes in their faces, to surround them and back them up against the walls, to taunt them in the hallways and insult them to their faces? Why is it that the "popular" crowd is always the wealthy and beautiful crowd? Why does the "popular" crowd always rule the school and have the right to terrorize anyone on the outside?

These are serious questions, but they're not getting asked. They're not getting asked because it looks like casting the blame on the victims instead of the perpetrators. But it is almost chilling to hear the "in" survivors say they'll stop the taunting — because they fear retaliation, though, not because they respect or value their "out" peers.

An answer to the violence in Littleton is not going to be found unless America takes a long, hard, unflinching look at its social Darwinism, at its glorification not of violence but of wealth, beauty and power, at its disregard for the imperfect, the weak, the poor, the strange, the nonconformist and the unloved. These serious vices expose a culture that has no depth, no capacity for self-reflection, and no God, beginning with the easy target of popular culture but running right through the cold heart of its highest ideals and most respectable institutions.

The horrible truth about Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold's assault on Columbine is that, in a sick way, it showed how well they had learned their lessons. They learned that the strong are allowed to tyrannize the weak. They learned that all they had to do was become the strong ones, and then the tables would be turned. They learned that violence solves all problems, from winning a computer game to controlling a troubled European nation. They learned that hate could help them belong to one powerful group after they'd been rejected by all the others. They learned that they themselves were worthless in the eyes of America.

And before their life-hating culture could hypocritically pronounce judgment on them, before family or state or even God could proclaim the sentence on their lives, they took control of the one thing left to them: death.

Eric and Dylan's double suicide was not a final evasion of responsibility. It was the final word on the value of life.