By now, you have seen and heard the response of Miss South Carolina as she answered a question on why 1/5 of Americans can’t find the US on a world map. I must admit, at first I laughed too…and couldn’t believe what she said. Her response has been shown all over the world and it’s topping You Tube’s view list. I think the real alarm shouldn’t be about a teenage girl who lost her focus answering a simple question (put yourself on national TV with millions of viewers, lights, contest pressure, etc and try to spell your name!). Why isn’t there an outcry about about why we just don’t know much about our own country? My sixth grader knows more than I do about geography and probably more than 90% of  Americans. Incidentally, presidential candidiate Bill Richardson (of no relation to yours truly) gave almost as lame an answer to a question asked of him lately. Who hasn’t said something stupid or made a statement that doesn’t make sense. We were just lucky no one was rolling a camera.

 It seems that You Tube has turned our society into this large mass of Candid Camera watchers. We like to see someone else stumble. So instead of encouraging young people like Lauren Caitlin Upton, who worked hard to be in a national televised pageant, we  laugh at the expense of an eighteen year old girl who likely just got nervous. So now we are not only ignorant about geography, we are also ignorant about how to treat other people. Having been an escort in a nationally televised pageant (MANY years ago) and now as a professional speaker for almost twenty years, I feel her pain. It’s not easy to be up in front of people while trying to make the butterflies fly in motion and communicate your thoughts. While we laugh at this humiliated young girl (btw, she did a masterful job on Good Morning America this am laughing at herself) what are we teaching our kids about failure and risk taking?  Let’s let little Miss Sunshine off the hook…and go teach some civility and while we’re at it, some geography to US Americans everywhere.

Tim Richardson is an inspirational speaker who speaks about how giving increases employee morale, lowers employee turnover, increases customer loyalty and creates higher profits for Fortune 500 companies, associations, and national conventions. He is the founder of the The Worlds Biggest Blog Party an event which will connect bloggers from all over the world to raise money for charity. He is also founder and president of the Bill Walter Melanoma Research Fund. For more information on Tim, go to www.TimRichardson.com