It has been quite a few years now, but I remember my neighbor's tact.

The neighbor didn't want to accuse anyone unjustly, so she just reported the facts as she had observed them."I don't know if there is a connection between the two events, but yesterday I saw your son and his friend out on the street with their BB guns. Their guns were pointed up at the street light for a while. I notice tonight that the street light in front of my house is out." I'm not always that quick, but I caught the connection.

My response was not, "My son would never do anything like this." I knew better. I'd made these connections before. What I tried to do was civilly thank my neighbor while trying to think how I could gently and effectively work with my son. I was fuming inside while doing this.

There had been other discussions and dealings with a BB gun and my son. It was the same neighbor who called a month earlier to tell me that the horses in the corral out back were sure frisky when my son had his BB gun pointed in the coral. There may be a connection between the gun, the son and the horses.

My son and I solved the problem of the street light with a contrite confession to the city manager. The light was replaced by the city crew and litter was cleaned from the road in an informal arrangement, or plea bargain, with the city employees. The gun was grounded for a while.

It might be easy to say, along with Hillary Rodham Clinton, that it takes a village to raise a child. It took a neighbor, a city manager, a police officer and the manufacturer of Daisy Air Rifles to help with this boy. I think if the ideas weren't so closely tied to the first lady, it would get rave reviews from conservatives and liberals alike. For some reasons she is a lightning rod, and even good ideas from the Clintons have some tough going, especially in Utah.

The idea of a village raising a child was mentioned by Bob Dole in his Aug. 15 acceptance speech at the GOP convention. "And with all due respect, I am here to tell you it does not take a village to raise a child. It takes a family to raise a child." Perhaps it was Gov. John Engler of Michigan who said it first. "The wisdom of the ages reveals that our moral compass cannot ultimately come from Lansing or from another state capital, any more than it can come from the nation's capital, or Hollywood, or the United Nations, or some abstract liberal conception of the `Village.' It comes from deep within us - it comes from our character, which is forged in our families and our faith and tempered in the arena of decisionmaking and action."

If our moral compass comes from our families and our faith, it comes from our village. The village that helps me raise a family is not the United Nations or other straw people propped up by Gov. Engler. The village that helped me included our local Scoutmaster, bishop, police officer, Sunday School teacher, neighbor and school teacher.

The fact is that I couldn't solve the problem myself. I needed neighbors.

I especially needed a neighbor who knew her neighborhood well enough that she knew whose kid had the air rifle and that a first call to his father would be more effective than a first call to the police department.

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Both liberals and conservatives are right. Just as we can't say whether the chicken or egg came first, we can't say which comes first, family values or village values. Each influences the other in a perpetual chain of values transmission, and it takes a strong village and strong families, to raise good children. Villages can't do it without families and even the strongest family needs the support of the village. We can't do it alone.

Perhaps it may help us to think of our schools as part of our village instead of part of our large unmanageable world. Problems are best solved at a very local level. If I call the teacher, who I know personally because I've been to parent-teacher conferences, I can get the personal help I need much easier than if I call the principal or superintendent or school board member or governor. Certainly there is more help in my village than there is in relying on the school board to make a rule or Congress to make a law.

What I should expect from these leaders who have never met any of my children and think of education in a big collective sense, is that they will implement policies that will free me and my kids and their teachers to find the best way to solve our very personal problems in our very local village.

This may not work in an election year when each presidential candidate does his best to vilify his opponent. It may not work when we look too far away for solutions to very personal and local problems of our particular village. Even at the expense of taking a firm stand squarely on the fence, let me suggest that it may help to merge the ideas of Bob Dole and Bill Clinton. It takes a village of families.

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