Springfield, Ore., buried the last of its dead children early Tuesday afternoon. TV crews packed up their gear, reporters signed off, a sensation-seeking, fickle nation turned its attention elsewhere. The town that bled in public joined the sorrowful list of towns that now must heal on their own.

At precisely the same moment in Bangor, three time zones away, the day was drawing to a close. But for a group of five, the day’s work was not yet done. They met in this newspaper’s conference room, spontaneously and urgently, not to ask if it can happen here but rather how it can be prevented from happening here.

From different perspectives, they’ve all seen the effect this national obsession with violence has upon its young. Superior Court Justice Andrew Mead deals daily with the 18-year-old whose pseudo-rapper attitude betrays an arrested emotional development that would be shocking in one half that age. School Committee Chairwoman Martha Newman knows the teachers and students who arrive at school each day with a sense of dread and who leave with a sense of relief. School psychologist Mark Roth and Acadia Hospital’s Alan Comeau plumb the depths of spiritually abandoned kids in the counseling session and the clinical setting. The Rev. James Haddix, pastor of All Soul’s Church, is witness to a society that has replaced right and wrong with profit and loss.

This deep-rooted national disgrace needs long-term solutions, but it also needs some quick fixes. The 15-year-old Springfield killer, Kip Kinkel, brought a gun to school the day before his rampage. He was suspended, taken into police custody and released by the court to his parents. Within hours, his parents were dead and so were two schoolmates. Springfield officials now ask their legislature to require that any kid bringing a gun to an Oregon school be held for 72 hours for psychological evaluation.

Mead observes that similar proposals have gone before previous Maine legislatures and gotten nowhere — perhaps it’s due to concerns about civil liberties, perhaps its a turf issue between government agencies and the medical profession. He wonders if perhaps the response from lawmakers will be different next time. All five wonder if Maine will ever get a parental responsibility law with some teeth in it, or a law holding adult gun owners culpable for the damage that results from the careless storage of firearms.

Some band-aids already are in place. Bangor police walk beats at the city’s high school and two middle schools and plans to increase that presence are in the works. Acadia’s Speak out for Kids Campaign has, among many other things, distributed 1,300 gun locks free of charge.

Long-term, the group knows the symptoms but, like everyone else, still is searching for remedies. Newman notes that while less than 20 percent of the kids in Bangor schools live in homes with both biological parents, schools that attempt to fill this parenting gap are attacked as meddlers. Roth can only shake his head when asked about the effect the endless wave of violent images the entertainment and news industries has upon young minds. Haddix can’t understand why anyone who takes a stand for values, such as objecting to the exploitation of Bangor’s young girls by nude-dancing joints, is immediately portrayed as a right-wing zealot. He is at a loss to explain how a young man he spoke to recently came to the conclusion that the Nazis weren’t necessarily wrong — they just had different values.

Comeau hits the nail on the head. His work with teen suicide has made its connection to schoolhouse massacres readily apparent. They are two sides of the same coin; the coin that is earned in celebrating unremorseful violence, in selling nihilism and callousness, in pitching the glory of death in a hail of gunfire.

Bangor has the same movie theaters, video and game rental outlets as does Springfield. They trade in the same mayhem and gore that Springfield’s merchants sold to young Kinkel. Bangor has the same internet access to instructions for making bombs. Bangor now even has a gothic store, a new retail outlet for death and despair.

But Bangor also has some powerful resources that can reverse this tide. It has programs, such as United Way’s “Keeping Kids on Track” and Partnerships for Healthy Communities. It has a group of five who are willing to give their time to organize a community-wide effort to let kids know they matter. Their next meeting will be at Acadia Hospital at a date to be announced. Watch for it. They need your support.

Most importantly, Bangor has a citizenry that will band together. The Clean Clothes Campaign sent a message that this city will not support sweatshops that prey upon Third World children. Will Bangor now make the same effort for its own children?

At this moment, the cities and town of this country can be divided into two categories — those that think what happened in Springfield (and Jonesboro, and Edinboro, and West Paducah and so on) cannot happen to them and those that know it will if the community does nothing. Let Bangor be among the latter.