Thursday, February 19, 2009

Kids These Days

I get SO tired of hearing about how teens/tweens/children in this day and age are growing up with no values or sense of their place in the world. Sure, they have an insane amount of information at their fingertips, and unprecedented access to things that were previously reserved for "adults". And they often communicate in ways that older folks (myself included! I refuse to even check Twitter out) don't understand. But to say that these things have distanced them from their humanity is deliberately myopic.

Last fall, I was moved to tears by the story of teens in complete sincerity electing a girl with Down Syndrome as their Homecoming Queen.

And today, I learned of this:

http://sports.espn.go.com/highschool/rise/basketball/boys/news/story?id=3914375

A basketball player lost his mother to cancer, and wanted to play in the game that evening. He had been left off the roster due to his family situation, but he wanted to play. The visiting team argued with officials to allow it without a penalty, but the officials basically said "rules are rules" and declared that the visitors needed to take their 2 free throws. In a wonderful gesture of sportsmanship and compassion, Darius McNeal volunteered to take the free throws, and then basically threw them both away.

These are just items that were noteworthy enough to make national news. How many more stories like this occur every single day? I'm willing to bet that it is FAR more than adults give "the younger generation" credit for.

3 comments:

Gemel said...

Bless you, me too.

Where have the children gone?

We have in their place mini adults, who, think that they know it all and more importantly, expect it all. Humanity has a massive lesson to learn, we have not come as far as we may have thought, some of us (you and me) can see it, life has become so false, and, forgive me, plastic, there is no real emotion, and those of us who 'feel' are made to feel less than normal, children are under pressure to 'fit' in, to be 'cool' (if that is still a modern term) and where does that leave those of us that see outside the frame? Alone? Wishing for a return of our childhood, of days of innocence and laughter.........

Leilani said...

Katrina, we rarely hear about good kids like this because bad news is "sexy" and sells better.

Today's word verification is "phical"--a fancy spelling for the matter that is in one's intestines.

Tammy R said...

These articles are just so sweet that I just had to share them with my friends on Facebook.

Btw, Trina, I've changed my blog's name to The Gluttonous Gourmet, just so you know! ;-)