It is easy to pontificate about the failings of a single individual like Latrell Sprewell. But events like the death of Diana and Mother Theresa and the Promise Keepers march drive home the key lesson of the year -- Americans know that there is something profoundly wrong with the entire American family and we yearn for a sense of moral direction that will set things right again. PNS editor Richard Rodriguez, author of Days of Obligation (Viking-Penguin), writes for Harper's, the Los Angeles Times, and the PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer.

SAN FRANCISCO -- After Latrell Sprewell, a black basketball player for the Golden State Warriors, tried to choke his white coach, P.J. Carlissimo, the nation's sports pages were filled with the usual sermonizing. The million dollar thug is a bad role model, etc., etc.

My own view is that the moral life of this country is not created by role models. The heroes and heroines of any society merely summarize the moral tone of the entire community. Or to put matters plainly: If a society's athletes are becoming monsters, chances are pretty good that the society around them is not much better.

We are, surely, individually responsible for our moral behavior. But as members of a society, we also influence one another, establish taboos or violate them in ways that are hurtful or helpful to the general moral tone. The corrupt policeman in Tijuana and the black drug dealer in San Diego are ultimately moral partners with the cocaine yuppies in La Jolla.

The basketball player becomes arrogant once he has signed his several-million-dollar contract with Converse or Nike. Shouldn't we wonder about the arrogance of executives at Nike or Converse and the agents and lawyers who handle such deals?

There they all were at Mr. Sprewell's press conference in a cheap motel ballroom in Oakland. On one side of Sprewell sat his very white agent, and his lawyer, Mr. Johnny Cochran, a high-priced opponent of racism and exponent of cynicism. On the other side was the fast-talking mouth of the Players' Union. Latrell Sprewell muttered an inelegant apology -- then took no questions. Everyone else did the talking.

The lesson to America's children? No man, certainly no thug basketball player, is an island entire to itself, not in this day of $20 million-dollar contracts.

If there was something particularly shocking about the Sprewell incident, it was that the athletic coach is one of the few adult figures who assume authority for many young people in this country.

But, then, who else in our society dares to lecture the young and to guide them? One noticed, after Sprewell's assault, the silence from the "elders" of black America. Who, in what survives as the black civil rights establishment, even presumes any more to exert moral suasion over the new generation? The only moral voice in Black America, I regret to say, comes these days from Minister Louis Farrakhan. Despite my deep respect for the Nation of Islam, Minister Farrakhan, alas, strikes me as America's most important racist and demagogue. But he was away, after the Sprewell incident, in the Middle East, playing the diplomat to flashing cameras.

I do not forget, however, that it was Farrakhan who organized in 1995 the Million Man March on Washington. That march of black fathers and sons was an extraordinary event, mainly because its purpose and impact was moral, not political.

This year's biggest religious story was another Million Man March, in imitation of Farrakhan's. An ex-football coach, Bill McCarty, "Coach Mac", managed to draw thousands of men, most of them white, to the Washington Mall, to "covenant with God."

America's secular media, meanwhile, was preoccupied with the various objections of the National Organization For Women to the Promise Keepers. But it was no less astonishing that so many American males, beginning with Coach Mac himself, felt the need to confess publicly their failings as husbands and fathers.

Organizers for a later Million Woman March in Philadelphia missed the point. Their focus was on racial identity and politics. The keynote for the event was the notorious Winnie Mandela. What would Ms. Mandela understand about the enormous moral hunger that is now seizing America?

One of the first persons to gage this moral hunger, to her profit, has been radio talk show host Laura Schlesinger, "Dr. Laura" as she is called by millions of her listeners. She is a bully and a moral show off. Poor Rush Limbaugh, on the other hand, is still preoccupied with Trent Lott and Bill Clinton. What Dr. Laura wisely knows is that Americans are troubled by the silence in the bedroom and around the kitchen table -- the gap between male and female, adult and child.

Something is wrong with the entire American family. Just as inner city drug dealers depend on suburban users, just as thug athletes are managed by crass agents, so mommies and daddies create and support one another and their children -- or they don't.

The story of the year, not coincidentally, was the death of Lady Diana. For days after, London (one of the most masculine capitals of the world) was in tears, yearning for the beautiful lost mother. Americans, too, were unable to stray from the flickering light of television.

Why? Why, several days after Diana's death, did millions of people in the world again gasp at the news from Calcutta that Mother Theresa had died?

1997 will be remembered as the year the world mourned for the death of the mother. What people as grotesquely different as Louis Farrakhan and Laura Schlesinger understand to their mutual advantage is that there is a great yearning in the world now for parents.

What Theresa of Calcutta showed, of course, is that one does not need to be a biological parent to be a good mother or, indeed, a good father. She was, in my opinion, the greatest feminist of the century, establishing hospitals and orphanages, working within a very male Catholic church, undaunted.

She belonged, I think, to a 19th century tradition of feminism. Feminists a century ago were not simply involved with their own emancipation. They worked simultaneously for the liberation of children and the abolition of slavery.

Today's American feminists, like their careerist boyfriends, incline to a different sort of feminism -- the feminism of ME. Self-liberation is summarized by a career and the justification for self-seeking is contained by a thin notion of "role models."

It's Gloria Steinem logic: If we had more women doctors, more girls in America would have more role models. Nowhere, however, in the talk of role models is there any concern about the moral example that elders give or don't give to the young. The preoccupation is simply occupational.

My suspicion is that we would have better doctors, more caring, more loving doctors, if we had fewer role models.

In general, the political left has been slower than the political right in recognizing the moral unease that afflicts America. But both sides would be wrong to suppose that here is a crisis for politicians to solve. Our moral dilemma is too far reaching and intimate for politicians to manage.

As the year ends, one has the weird sense that America is a country with many children but without adults.