A month late, to be sure but good for openers...

The nation had itself a good chortle yesterday. Perhaps a return to public execution of death row inmates would fix this. It would seem we are in the 21st century so content and so self-absorbed until even aspiration to greatness is somehow politically incorrect and socially ungainly . . . if someone else is doing it. Miss Teen USA’s big winner for 2007 was Miss Colorado. This is the only thing about her that is newsworthy so far. On the other hand, a heart-stoppingly beautiful, dazzling and sexy, gorgeous beyond compare Lexington gal, last name of Upton, is Miss Teen S.C. She was third runner up, but the entertainment news crews made a darling of her, in the pariah/condemned villain sense, within hours after her on-stage appearance. The situation cries out for perspective. On the home front, boys and girls her age, or at least from her age group, are now themselves sitting wide-eyed and tongue-tied, not at all certain of their direction in life, in military recruiters’ offices, reading, hearing, questioning, signing, agreeing, and taking an oath. Others already arrived at Parris Island, Fort Benning, Fort Leonard Wood, Fort Jackson, Great Lakes Naval, etc., last night ate meals far more rapidly than they ever imagined they could, wolfing food down quicker than anyone ever told them they had to before, sleeping harder than they have since infancy because they have figured out if they do not sleep when they are told to, they surely will get rest at no other time - - cell phones, iPods, car keys and privacy are now the stuff of dreams. When they can, they marvel at how the lives they had been so bored with before now seem like all any reasonable person could ask for. Then there are the late-teens or early 20-somethings already in Afghanistan, Kuwait, Iraq, sweating off pounds they didn’t know they had in body armor and Kevlar helmets, shooting, being shot at, boarding helicopters, driving inadequately armored vehicles, setting up sniper nests, handing out candy to local kids, all in heat no one back home will believe until the snapshots of the thermometers reading 130 or more appear on flickr.com, yahoo, etc., all the while with only a target date as to when it will all be over - - no guarantees. What they have done, what they are doing, and what they will continue to do (get out of your mind, forever, no matter who wins the White House, this idea about some kind of end to the Iraq occupation) merits soul-felt awe and accolades and glorification beyond sitting in the audience of a beauty contest. However, in August of 2007, the couch potato masses stopped not to celebrate epic heroism by its soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines, or to thank God we still have young men and women cut from that fabric, seemingly despite every convention we are anymore permitted to observe; nay, it was far more important for a nation of overweight, over-privileged, overprotected babies with absolutely nothing better to do with their time than stare at beauty contests, to buffer and leaven their own vapid, feeble, achievement-impoverished despair by targeting and tearing down one high school kid who dared to take up the gauntlet. Theodore Roosevelt said it best - - ‘‘It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man…who does actually strive to do the deeds, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly…’’
Young Miss Lauren Upton, don’t ever change.