"I Made A Mistake!"

© Dr. Gary D. Lemmons, September 2, 2007

Lauren Caitlin Upton, Miss South Carolina and third runner-up in the 2007 Miss Teen USA Pageant, has been the object of much ridicule over the past week for her jumbled response to the pageant question of “why a fifth of Americans can’t locate the U.S. on a world map.”  While NBC attempted to rehabilitate her on the TODAY Show, the jokesters and YouTube.com groupies have had a field day.

I suppose it is the grandfather in me, but I feel I have to come to the young lady’s aid.

In the interest of total honesty, I don’t like beauty contests.  I attended a livestock sale with my father when I was about four years old, and when I witnessed my first beauty contest at about the age of 14, I was struck by the similarity of the two events.  Even though I emceed a few such school pageants during my teaching career, the idea of beautiful young women parading around a stage like a herd of …whatever…doesn’t appeal to me, but that is a personal preference.  If you like beauty pageants, more power to you.

Now, at the outset of my defense of Lauren, it is clear that she is probably not the sharpest knife in the drawer.  While adequately intelligent, she doesn’t strike me as gifted, and at her age, she has not experienced the various vicissitudes of life that shape and mold our character and endow our deportment with the wisdom of coping.  She has, however, certainly gained some of that experience with the beauty pageant question.

The thing that strikes me about her was her response to Matt Lauer and Ann Curry:

“I made a mistake.”

How many teenagers ever utter those four words? 

For that matter, how many adults say them all that much?

Most of the time, the response is:

“Well, someone else said something or did something that caused me to do something that was incorrect, but if someone else had only…..

In my judgment, those four words, “I made a mistake,” speak volumes about the character of Lauren Caitlin Upton.  Politicians, business leaders, high profile entertainer celebrities, sports figures, and…yes…even school teachers might consider making that sentence a part of their repertoire of verbiage from time to time.

If she keeps that objective attitude of self, I doubt not that Lauren Caitlin Upton will be quite successful in life, regardless of whatever path she chooses to pursue.  In fact, she may gain more positive results from her gaff than the embarrassment she has suffered.  After all, what is the name of the winner of the 2007 Miss Teen title?!?

Incidentally, the reason a fifth of Americans cannot identify the United State on a world map is because emphasis on "geography" has been taken out of the public school curriculum.  It is sort of hard to devise map skill questions that can be answered by bubbling in a circle on standardized tests.