Grief and anger compete today after the death of Jessica Dubroff in the crash of the plane the seven-year-old girl was piloting cross country.

Anger wins.

Anger at the parents who put a child in that cockpit.

Anger at the flight instructor who let them.

Anger at the cult of celebrity that has systematically killed off common sense in America.

We talk a lot about rights versus responsibilities in this country, but we almost always have the poor in mind when we do.

When flames engulf a tenement apartment we are quick to ask: "How could that mother have left her children home alone to run to the store for milk?"

When a child is shot dead on a summer night on a city street, we ask: "What was he doing out at that hour?"

This morning it is impossible not to ask about the ambitious middle-class parents of a precocious little girl: "What the hell were Jessica Dubroff's mother and father thinking?"

They certainly had a right to strap their little girl into a pilot's seat at Half Moon Bay Airport in California and point her toward the East Coast and 15 minutes of fame. But, just as surely, they had a responsibility not to.

Jessica was 4-foot-2. She weighed 55 pounds. She needed a booster seat to reach the control panel and leg extenders to reach the rudder pedals!

Her death was no accident. This child was put in harm's way.

Whether through a twisted sense of adventure, or a more base impulse toward self-promotion, Jessica's mother and father forgot that the first responsibility of parents is to protect their children.

"I don't want this to mean to people that you should hold your children down, that you don't give them freedom and choice," Jessica's mother, Blair Hathaway, said upon learning of her daughter's death. "And, God, that was what her beauty was. She got to choose."

Oh, Mrs. Hathaway, I know you are in shock, but what in heaven's name are you talking about?

Seven is old enough to choose which sweater to wear with what skirt, to choose, at least for awhile, to hate broccoli. But it is nowhere near old enough to choose to risk life and limb to become the youngest person to pilot an airplane across America.

Even the idea of such a record is obscene. That's why the Guinness Book of World Records eliminated the youngest pilot category years ago, knowing it had the potential to encourage such dangerous flights.

It's not just Jessica's parents who lost their moorings. The whole state of California seems to have taken leave of its senses.

Forrest Storz is a flight instructor at the airport south of San Francisco where Jessica had taken 30 hours of instruction in the last four months.

"Whatever happened was beyond their control," he said yesterday. "Some day your number is up."

What?

Have we gone so far down the road of evading responsibility that we blame fate for the crash of an airplane being piloted by a seven-year-old?

I understand that Jessica was a very, very bright child and that she really, really liked to fly. But I also know what she said about flying during the pre-flight publicity: "I enjoy looking out the window. But you have to concentrate on flying."

What she enjoyed doing and what she had to do to accomplish her goal -- or her parents' goal -- were two different things.

On any given day, my seven-year-old would really, really like to try his hand at any number of adult-sized challenges. He even has the skills to accomplish some of them. But what he lacks, and what Jessica lacked when she got behind the controls in that cockpit, was not the skill but the judgment that comes with maturity.

Seven-year-olds might know that thunder is nothing more than the violent expansion of air that has been heated by lightning, but that doesn't stop them from hiding under the covers.

They don't lack knowledge; they lack maturity.

The cross-country flight was all his idea, Lloyd Dubroff said the day before he, his daughter and her flight instructor climbed into that four-seat Cessna 177B Cardinal. "I'm the culprit," he boasted.

May you rest in peace, Mr. Dubroff, but you were right about that.