The air in America in these post-Arkansas days is full of adults saying, "We don't know. . ." In fact, now we should know more about what it's like to be a kid in a country where most adults assume no connection between behavior and consequences. PNS editor Richard Rodriguez is author of "Days of Obligation" and the forthcoming "The Color Brown." He is a regular essayist for the News Hour with Jim Lehrer and the Los Angeles Sunday Times.

One of the boys in prison in Jonesboro, Ark., has told visitors that he wishes the whole thing never happened. He wants to go home to his mommy.

Ever since that terrible morning at Westside Middle School, we adults have been wringing our hands, saying we do not understand children anymore, that we do not recognize the two boys emerging out of the forest, dressed in camouflage, rifles in hand, as our children.

In truth, nothing is very surprising about the cruelty of children. It is as routine as a boring summer day when kids torture insects or family pets. All of us remember from our own childhood bullies and midget tyrants. One child puts a razor blade in a bar of soap in the school bathroom; another places broken glass in the playground sand; and another torches the dumpster behind the church -- "just to see what will happen."

In truth, nothing is so terrible as the "innocence" of childhood. A man I know shudders as he remembers a June day, many years ago, when he shot another boy with a beebee gun out of some terrible curiosity. He remembers the gaping black circle on his friend's thin leg. He remembers the dull, comprehending moment of regret, as several adults came running across the lawn.

In some less innocent America, adults used to scold and lecture children (their own and the neighbors' kids), trying always to teach them that actions had consequences.

I used to hang out as a kid with a group of middle-class boys that, when boredom settled, would ride out to the edge of town to throw rocks at an encampment of hobos. "Bombing the bums," we used to call it. We must have been ten or eleven at the time. When one of our fathers heard about it, he gathered us in his living room and promised us consequences. Made us imagine consequences: "If I ever catch you doing that again,..."

I can still hear that man's threat, hanging in the air over several decades, but it seems now to belong to a different century, another America. For the country in which we live now is a nation filled with adults who have no sense of consequences in their own lives and thus no possibility of ever teaching their children.

Last week, in the days after Jonesboro, small-town America was blaming big-city America for its troubles. Hollywood producers had desensitized our children to violence. The gang culture of South Central L.A. had infected pastoral Jonesboro. (Hadn't one of the boys bragged to a classmate that he was a "Blood"?)

And some in big cities talked about the violence in those little white towns bordered by the Baptist church and Wal-Mart. Take the Greyhound south and you ride into the darkest sector of the American soul: West Paducah, Pearl, Lineville, Blackville, Stephen King territory.

Some adults think the solution is longer jail terms -- "give 'em life!" An army of child psychologists on CNN has one therapy or another to recommend. And, from Africa, where he is touring, President Clinton suggests asking Attorney General Janet Reno to convene a panel of experts to study the problem of youth run amok.

One has the sense that none of the experts has ever read William Golding's "Lord of the Flies" or been to summer camp. One has the sense, too, that few adults in America can imagine what it is like to be a kid today in a country where there are no consequences.

We adults take a pill or get an abortion or otherwise avoid unwanted consequences; we blame the city if we are in the suburbs, or the suburbs if we are in the city; we blame Freud's mother for the way we behave or we blame the priest; we sue the cigarette company when we get emphysema or we sue McDonald's when the coffee scalds our thighs. We take kids to movies where people get their heads blown off, then we blame Bruce Willis when our kids come out of the theater with eyes drained of all color.

We live in an America where adults assume no connection between behavior and consequences. Why should we be surprised that our children are missing the crucial lesson of their moral education?

Samuel Beckett, the absurdist Irish playwright, was stabbed one day in Paris by an utter stranger. Beckettt survived the attack. Later he visited his assailant in prison, to ask: Why?

The prisoner had nothing to say. To each of Beckett's questions he would only mumble, "I don't know."

There is no more chilling answer an adult can give. It is a robotic answer, a childish lament: I don't know why I did it.

The air in America is full of adults saying, "We don't know. " "We don't know." The father in Jonesboro gave his son a gun one Christmas, taught him how to aim it. He apparently did not teach him that the gun is real, and that a bullet has flesh-and-blood consequences.

The grandfather was on TV last week, weeping at the sudden discovery of the grandson he did not know. He seemed as much a child as the imprisoned boy.

Now, they both know. And they don't. One of the boys in the Jonesboro jail has told visitors that he doesn't remember even pulling the trigger. So disconnected is he from his own behavior.

We want them to be punished for their grievous action -- we adults want the Arkansas law that tempers the punishment of minors to be overruled by federal law. But we also recognize the pathos of the boys' plight.

We wish we could save them from the prison of consequence. It cannot be done. This is the nature of tragedy. Those two boys will never escape the consequence of what they have done. It is their imprisonment -- and ours.