Show some respect for young people

(The following is my column for the Newton County News.)

During 22 years of covering school and sports activities for southwest Missouri newspapers and conducting hundreds of interviews with teenagers, I developed a healthy respect for their intelligence and the depth of their feelings.


That knowledge offered me an advantage 11 years ago when I stepped into the little trailer where I taught my first creative writing classes at Diamond Middle School. I find out quickly that students can be silly, flaky, sometimes disruptive, but even in the sixth, seventh, and eighth grade classes I was teaching, they can comprehend serious issues and they can have intelligent conversations on those issues, often offering insightful comments.

Since that time, I have made discussions a central part of my classes, using them to lead students into every kind of writing from persuasive essays, to comparison/contrast papers, to research assignments. I have never had a class at Diamond Middle School, or at South and East middle schools in Joplin that disappointed me.

So with that background, I have developed a strong resentment toward people who believe that teenagers and young adults are totally self-absorbed and do not care about serious issues.

Would many of them rather be playing video games, texting with friends, or heading to the movies or the mall? Absolutely (and there are scores of adults who feel the same way)! But to say that they do not have the capacity to understand and form their own opinions about the serious challenges that face our communities and our nation is an insult to young people.

Some adults try to reach young people by talking down to them and that would appear to be the message being offered by our Seventh District Congressman Roy Blunt as he mounts a campaign for the U. S. Senate.

Today, while reading a Washington Examiner article online, I came across a mention of a YouTube video posted by the Blunt Brigade and paid for by the Blunt for Senate campaign committee. The video was an amateurish and not particularly funny spoof of the currently popular Old Spice commercials. In the video, a Blunt supporter, doing an imitation of the man in those commercials, encourages young people to apply for internships.

After watching that video, I discovered another Blunt Brigade video, which used the same obnoxious approach to encourage young people to volunteer to work in the Senate campaign.

I have this message to Roy Blunt- If you want to attract the best and brightest of our young people- show them some respect. Intelligent teenagers are plentiful in southwest Missouri and many of them have the conservative beliefs you trumpet in your advertising.

In my time covering southwest Missouri politics as a reporter and in the years since as a blogger, I have come across many teens and young adults working in various political campaigns who are both serious and intelligent.

As for this generally accepted belief that teenagers are self-absorbed and selfish, this does not mesh with reality. My students often spend their vacations on mission trips, they volunteer for their churches and their communities, as well as throwing themselves into various activities to help their schools.

Can teenagers act silly and do things that boggle the mind? Absolutely! It’s part of growing up. But don’t ever mistake that youthful exuberance for a lack of intelligence or compassion.

And don’t ever, ever pander to them as the Blunt campaign has done with its insulting effort to communicate with young people “at their own level.”

Show teenagers some respect and you will be amazed at what they can accomplish.