I've been doing a lot of editing in the last few days and am now working on Teacher's address that he gave at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris in October 2006. He was talking about Chinese education and the importance the Chinese placed on "benevolence and justice, love, and supreme harmony." When I came to that line, I remembered something that happened in the US almost at the same time Teacher was giving his talk.

It began with one of those senseless acts, when a person is in so much pain that the suffering overwhelms him and he lashes out at the most innocent beings he can find.

In a Lancaster County schoolhouse in Pennsylvania, a man entered an Amish school and bound several girls. One of the girls, thirteen-year-old Marian Fisher, realizing what the gunman was going to do and trying to save the younger girls in the room said "Shoot me first."

Then Barbie, her eleven-year-old sister, said, "Shoot me second."

Barbie survived. As did four other girls.

Five girls died: Naomi Rose Ebersole, 7; sisters Mary Liz Miller, 8, and Lena Miller, 7; and Anna Mae Stoltzfus, 12.

And Marian Fisher.

Benevolence and love and supreme harmony. They are possible in our world. But to such a degree, I'd say they are rare. And yet they existed, surely in pure perfection, in two young Amish girls. To have such love for another human being to be able to quietly say:

"Shoot me first."

"Shoot me second."