NIAGARA FALLS —
The other day, at Mark’s Food Market on Hyde Park, I chatted with a 7-year-old and his aunt. I guessed the kid’s age at about 6, but he corrected me.
Usually, I am very good at guessing ages, and I was a little embarrassed to have mis-guessed his. So I made a joke to the kid by smilingly telling him that, “When I was your age,” then demonstrating by holding my hand high over my head, “I was this tall.”
The little boy looked at my hand, locked his eyes upon mine and, with no facial expression at all, shot out the word, “liar,” as he turned and walked away.
Of course, I was lying — well, I was really just joking. However, I thought that he would have laughed, or something, but never did I think that he would call me on it like he did. His aunt embarrassingly apologized.
A pervasive and bold honesty seemingly resides in kids today. Their knowledge bank is filled with all kinds of facts and judgments. Some of them are good, some bad, and some are yet to be determined. But I look at the kids today and I challenge Tom Brokaw’s assertion that the generation that fought WWII was America’s greatest.
I don’t think so. I think that America’s greatest generation is yet to be born and that it is laboring in the hearts and minds of the kids of today. While they often cross the ‘Father Knows Best’ and ‘Leave it to Beaver’ lines of respect of those revered bygone days, they are truly fooled only when they want to be truly fooled.
Some of them don’t want to be fooled, though. Take Samantha Lamantia, for instance. The 17-year-older is getting quite good at shooting trap down at the LaSalle Sportsmen’s Club. I have only done it once, aside from on the fantail of a U.S. destroyer doing 15 knots through the water, and am quite fair at it. Until recently, I wasn’t sure what trap was, so don’t be embarrassed when I explain that trap is the clay pigeons -— the orange, oblique flying disks — that the machine fires when you shout, “Pull.” Then you shoot at it with a shotgun.
Samantha is shooting much better than some of the guys that have been shooting trap for years. In fact, so much so that word has gotten got back to her class at Niagara-Wheatfield High School about her birdshot exploits. As such, some of the more peskier boys have decided not to be so pesky with her anymore.
For some reason, the teacher and students in one of her classes were discussing the sensitive issue of abortion. Samantha is against it and makes no qualms about telling others her position on the subject. After so doing, the teacher snidely chimed in, “Well, you think that it is OK to shoot animals.”
Samantha tersely asked her, “Do you believe in abortion?”
To all present, the teacher admitted that that she does and Samantha promptly commented, “Well, then, you believe in killing babies.”
“Well,” Samantha said the teacher replied, “Technically, it isn’t a baby. It’s a fetus.”
Reflecting back to the 7-year-older in the store, the teacher may as well raised her hand far over her head and said, “I was this tall when I was your age.”
“It’s a baby!” Samantha exclaimed. “It has a heartbeat, and it is a baby.”
Then, a using profound a logic that echoed down from a time that far exceeded her own years, Samantha quipped, “Besides, have you ever gone to a ‘fetus’ shower before?”
Sometimes, when I ask what is wrong with kids today, I have to point to us parents. We are the problem.
But, there are a lot of things that are right with kids today, too. If we parents, and teachers, had a better moral compass, then perhaps more of our kids would be in store for a better, brighter future like Samantha’s.
If we quit killing our babies — those who could have already become America’s Greatest Generation — then perhaps, when those that survive their mother’s decisions and grow taller and older, maybe they will kill clay pigeons at sports clubs, instead of killing each other for sport on the streets.
Wouldn’t that be much better?
Ken Hamilton is a Niagara Falls resident. Contact him at kenhamilton930@aol.com.
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HAMILTON: The store, the shotgun and the shower
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