Central High teens take a positive stand

"Youth today love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority, no respect for older people, and talk nonsense when they should be working. Young people do not stand up any longer when adults enter the room. They contradict their parents, talk too much in company, guzzle their food, lay their legs on the table and tyrannise their elders."

Sound familiar? If you haven't already said something like that, you've heard a parent or grandparent say it. This quote is actually attributed to Socrates and was said more than 2,500 years ago, but I have no doubt the sentiment has been expressed by the older generation since the first time a cave teen rolled his eyes when he was asked to take out the mammoth entrails.

In my Thursday column, I talked about the dangers of generalizations, such as saying all Southerners are stupid, drunken horseback riders or all Yankees are rude and don't know how to make iced tea. I'll stick by the tea statement, having suffered through the batches made by my own Yankee cousins, but on the whole, we know better. You can't say "all x are y" because there is always, always an exception. In fact, I think the exceptions are more often the rule.

For instance -- teenagers. When they "go bad," we hear about it on the news or read about it in the paper. Teens rob bank. Teens murder classmate. Teens roll their eyes when asked to take out the garbage. At first glance, all the "bad" kids making all the headlines seem to make all kids look bad. But think about it -- what makes these stories news is that it is so wrong, and rare, for them to behave so badly. If it were so common that more teenagers were gangstas and thugs, it would hardly be front page news. When I was a little girl, a marijuana bust made the front page, main story, with a huge, ugly headline. Nowadays, it's a three-line addition to the police blotter.

One splotch of black ink stands out a lot more when its on a clean white page.

Let's ignore the ink stain right now and look at the clean white page. Most of our teenagers are great kids. I have proof of that. I had the privilege last week to attend the Great Canned Food Drive celebration at Shelbyville Central High School, where the students donated almost 20,000 food and other items to Good Samaritan. They gathered the food, solicited businesses and individuals for supplies to buy more food, and loaded it all up in an old stock trailer to take to the charity office. Some of them spent three hours down at the SCHS gym they could have been using to study for finals, perfect their score on Mario Cart, or IM endlessly on Facebook and MySpace. These kids don't just want to help their community -- they want to do it with style.

Using sketched-out patterns, they used cans, boxes and bags to create works of art on the gym floor. The Grinch, the tree, his sleigh ... cleverly using the colors on the food containers, they created an edible mosaic that sent a message -- the Grinch "CAN" not steal Christmas.

But the message they really sent was much, much bigger. The effort these students, faculty and staff members went to said "We care," but again, the real message was even bigger.

How much easier would it have been to just box the stuff up and move it to Good Sam? Instead, they unboxed, arranged and rearranged thousands and thousands of food items, then had to rebox them all over again. It was hours of tedious, backbreaking work. What the school and the students did was make it a ceremony -- a special event.

I know there are some who won't approve of it and will throw scripture verses at me about the Pharisee who beats his hand upon his chest to get attention, compared to the poor widow who gives her mite quietly in the corner, but I don't think that really applies here. It was not themselves the students were attempting to bring into the limelight, but the need. The message I got, as they celebrated their success, was not "Aren't we wonderful for doing this?"

No, the message I got was that it was not their solemn duty to help others -- it was an honor.

So let's trot out some new headlines to combat those bad boys who have been getting all the ink. Let's recognize how good most of our kids are instead of how badly a few behave.

"Buzz takes out garbage without rolling eyes."

"Ben realizes folding clothes is part of doing laundry."

And, of course:

"Teens make a difference."