I, like you, feel deep compassion for the people of Santa Fe, and every other school, movie theatre, club, church and public location that has experienced a mass murder.

What to do? What do we do?

Well meaning people are now looking to, in fact, clamoring for the government to “fix” the problem and solve the dilemma. People are demanding legislation for sentences for “hate crimes”, creating programs to treat mental illness, gun control restrictions and regulating behaviors.

In my simple mind, it’s a paradox. It seems common sense that after planting plum trees, you get plums. You get the fruit of what you plant.

Stay with me.

The same people in the past who’ve said, chanted and believed that you cannot legislate morality are the same ones today wanting to legislate morality, except not morality itself, just the fruit of what’s grown on our plum trees.

People ask God for help, but God has been cast aside and removed from our schools. People ask for prayers for our schools, but aren’t allowed to pray at the school, in the classroom or at the football games.

People want children to learn how to love and respect others, yet the Ten Commandments, including the one that says “Thou shall not kill”, are being forcibly removed from public memorials, courthouses and haven’t been honored in schools for years. Now we have plums, and no one understands why.

We allow children to be bombarded with violent movies and TV programming. We let them shoot people for hours at a time in video games. We let them see rape, murder, assaults, bondage, abuse on TV, and call it entertainment. Then we get upset when the fruit we planted starts to ripen.

We wonder why our children don’t have the same sense of right and wrong we grew up with. Yet we tell, teach and show them that there is no absolute truth, no standard right or wrong, and everything they can imagine should be accepted, or even, celebrated. It’s fruit.

We tell kids they have a “right” to be confused about whether they are a boy or girl, what bathroom to use, or if a couple means Mommy and Daddy, or Mommy and Mommy. The same people saying you can’t legislate morality are the first to demand laws to legislate guns, teacher curriculum, church signs, and decide what is and isn’t a hate crime. Fruit.

We told our kids yesterday that it’s a woman’s body and parents have a “right” to take a living life within. Then today we wonder why some kids have no respect for life.

We tell our kids to celebrate diversity because diversity unifies. Isn’t “diversity unites” a paradox? Maybe I’m simple, but I thought unity unifies.

We tell children to be themselves because there is no one else in the world like them, which is true. The trouble is, we don’t finish and tell them the rest of the truth. We leave out that they are also a member of something bigger than themselves, a team, a society, a human race in which we all have duties, requirements and responsibilities.

We tell our kids not to bully, but then put them in alternative schools when they stop the bully by giving him a bloody nose.

Bullied children used to be able to escape to home after school. But now, we let our kids have 24 hour access to cell phones, internet, Facebook, Snap Chat and apps where the only limit is their imagination. Home isn’t safe anymore for bullied kids because the bully, often the elite, popular, in-crowd kids, can send a devastating text, sext, distorted pic, anything they want to attack a fragile soul.

Then a bullied kid goes ballistic, plans revenge, picks up a gun, and in a confused, out of control, immoral, angry tirade tries to get even with a system that has given them nothing solid to stand on.

I planted a plum tree. I get plums.

I remember going to a high school where in the parking lot there were unlocked pickup trucks with guns in racks of the back window. We didn’t have school shootings. It wasn’t the guns. It was the hearts.

We cannot stray from the Truth and allow children to wander aimlessly in the desert, and then expect to get some fruit other than the plums from the tree we planted.

If we want something besides the tragedies of a school shooting, we need to replant the vineyard. We need to drastically prune the access of teens to cell phones, something they see as a necessary right. We need to quit bombarding kids and destroying a generation with social experiments and allow only boys in the Boy Scouts and girls in the Girl Scouts.

We need to go back and acknowledge that all crime is hate, not just some crime. We need to defend and protect life for babies in the womb, the disabled in the hospital, and the elderly in nursing homes.

We need to apologize to God, ask for mercy, and humbly ask Him to remove the fruit of our own devices. We need to invite God back into schools and talk to Him before high school football games. We need to teach, but more importantly, show our children that there is absolute truth that we can build a solid foundation on.

The government can’t fix this. If they try, based on their track record, they will only make it worse than it already is. It’s the hearts. It’s always been about the hearts.

Replant the tree.