What I keep thinking when the subject turns to Newtown is that childhood is often remembered as a time of joy and innocence, but it's a time of terrible fears and great frights, too. The young are darkly imaginative.

I knew a 5-year-old girl who was so afraid of ET that when she saw a picture of him she'd scream. A friend, a sturdy American journalist, remembered being a child of 6 or 7. "I had monsters in the closet and under my bed. They walked across phone wires into my bedroom...