NICKEL MINES, Pa. - The two worlds stood in stark contrast Tuesday at this bucolic crossroads deep in the heart of Amish country.

   Within view of the one-room schoolhouse where a deranged killer opened fire Monday, killing five Amish children and wounding five others, television news trucks lined the rural lane, their generators belching smoke, cables crossing the pavement, satellite dishes poking into the sky. Reporters in high heels dabbed on makeup, preparing for their live stand-ups.

   The new world had parachuted into the old to report a very modern-day occurrence: yet another murderous rampage by a heavily armed man.

   All day long, the Amish who call this lovely, tranquil corner of Lancaster County home came and went, some on foot, most in horse-drawn buggies. They stole furtive glances at the media invaders but avoided eye contact. Few would talk or give their names.

   At one place, where cables from a television truck crossed the road, a horse pulling a wagon froze in fear, rearing back, whinnying, spooked by the foreign objects.

   The animal could have been a metaphor for the Amish themselves. As they passed nervously, staring straight ahead, it was as if any contact with the outsiders, the modern people, could end only one way - badly.

   Perhaps they are right.

   They came here generations ago to lead simple lives on the land. Many Old Order Amish still eschew cars, electricity and modern conveniences. Yet the modern world puts its heavy stamp on theirs, nonetheless.

   Just eight days before Monday's shooting rampage and less than two miles away, a 12-year-old Amish boy on his way to milk cows at a neighbor's farm was struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver who swerved off the road in a pickup truck. Emanuel S. King was killed instantly.

   As suburbia has encroached from all directions in recent years, a string of horrific accidents has occurred as speeding cars and SUVs have careened into slow-moving buggies, sometimes wiping out entire families. Two cultures literally colliding.

   Mini-marts, fast-food chains, cell-phone towers and vinyl-sided neighborhoods now pock the landscape along Route 30. The Amish and their old-time lifestyle in so many ways resemble an endangered species.

   Then came Monday. This most peaceful of people, who ask only to be left alone, found their children caught in the crosshairs of an English, as they call the modern outsiders, with a grudge and 600 rounds of ammunition.

   If parents could pick any place on the planet where they might believe their children were safe from the scourge of gun violence, it would be here amid the rolling corn and hay fields. Here where the farmers plow with horse teams.

   The next burg over is called Paradise, and it's easy to see why. If you looked up the word "Eden" in a dictionary, a photo of the Amish countryside would just about capture it.

   But the concept of paradise on Earth is a foolish conceit, and now not even the most Pollyannaish among us can cling to it.

   Violent death can come at any time and any place - even in the morning in a one-room schoolhouse in a pocket of America time allegedly forgot.

   There is no longer any denying the reality. If it could happen at the West Nickel Mines Amish School, it can happen at your child's school or mine.

   "We think Philadelphia, Baltimore and New York are where all the crazies are," a volunteer fireman keeping gawkers away told me. "We really should have known better. We never thought it could happen here."

   But it did. Just as it happened days earlier at a school in rural Wisconsin, where a 15-year-old shot and killed his principal. Just as it happened two days before that at a high school in sleepy Bailey, Colo., where a gunman took six girls hostage, killing one of them before killing himself.

   Three schools in one week. My God, who among us has the gall to look those parents in the face and tell them we have adequate gun controls in this country?

   The power of the status quo trumps the power of human heartbreak.

   For the Amish, and really for each and every one of us, it's done.

   The dream is over.