THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 18, 1996 TAG: 9602150202
SECTION: CAROLINA COAST PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
SOURCE: Ronald L. Speer
LENGTH: Medium: 76 lines
When my daughter Barbara was a teenager about 15 years ago, we lived near a woman who didn't like kids much.
Whenever anything went wrong, she blamed it on ``those damn teenagers.''
It didn't matter what the trouble was. A bank robbery? ``Those damn teenagers.''
A property tax hike? ``Those damn teenagers.'' War in the Middle East? ``Those damn teenagers.''
One day my fed-up daughter was in earshot when the neighbor said a particularly nasty bit of political chicanery by adults long past middle-age ``probably involves some damn teenagers.''
Barbara blew up.
``How can you blame everything on teenagers?'' she angrily asked the neighbor. ``Your own teenagers never cause trouble.
And you know me and my brother, and we don't do anything real bad. And our teenage friends aren't lawbreakers or mean.
``How can you keep saying that it's those `damn teenagers' when all the teenagers you know don't raise Cain or do bad things?''
The neighbor lady said that of course she didn't mean Barbara or her kids.
``But you're exceptional,'' she said. ``Most of them are spoiled rotten, and just out to cause trouble. I know, because I hear terrible things about them all the time.''
``Name one,'' insisted my daughter.
``You don't have to know one to know how much trouble they cause,'' the neighbor said. ``When you get a little older, you'll understand.''
My daughter never did understand. But she adopted the neighbor's slogan.
If I whined about not getting a raise, my daughter put it on ``those damn teenagers.'' If the tent blew down in a rainstorm in the wilds far from anyone else, the perpetrators were ``those damn teenagers.'' And if I badgered her about getting home late, the culprits were easily identifiable: ``It was those damn teenagers, Pops.''
I thought about my former neighbor's unproven perceptions last week when I spent a day at First Flight Middle School with 40 other adults telling hundreds of 6th-, 7th- and 8th-graders about possible careers.
From everything I've read and heard about modern youngsters, I was prepared for a bunch of violent, foul-talking potheads.
Surely, I figured from the way adults view today's kids, there'd be a gun or two confiscated, some funny-smelling cigarettes tucked in a pocket or two, and a spate of four-letter words from weirdly dressed bullies who couldn't read or write.
Boy, was I in for a surprise!
Probably 50 kids in groups of three or four came to talk with me. And I never heard a single mean word. They were polite as pie, some even calling me ``Sir.''
They were dressed in what even a graduate of the '50s considered normal clothes.
When I showed a copy of the front page from Aug. 14, 1945, that shouted ``WAR OVER,'' many of the kids knew it was about the end of World War II. And many knew that we had fought against Germany and Japan and Italy, with the help of Britain and Russia.
One girl pointed out on a centennial picture of the Statue of Liberty where she and her mother had peered out of the head of the 100-year-old lady.
And they were excited about the Dec. 18, 1903, paper which first reported man's flight - which happened just north of their school.
Most were articulate. Most were interested and interesting. And although I wasn't with them long, and don't know them as do their teachers or their parents, I thought they were good kids.
The teenagers' biggest problem, I'm telling my daughter, may be ``those damn adults.'' by CNB