County fair is still a safe place

The local county fair this past week once again disproved the myth that strangers are lurking around every corner just waiting to kidnap our children and do horrible things to them. There were kids everywhere. Some were in the company of their parents or grandparents but many, if not most, were alone or in small groups.
I saw little girls in pairs walking with arms intertwined, pinkies woven together or shoulder to shoulder. They appeared to be about the same age as my bonus granddaughter. There were equally young boys in packs of three or four. The younger ones, both boys and girls, would pull up a chair to the fish tanks displayed in the 4-H building and watch the fish swim around. This occupied them far longer than I expected it would. There were no grownups in sight who appeared to belong to these young people.
Older children wandered the fairgrounds chatting nonstop. A group of teenagers were dressed for the occasion in masks and face paint. Their costumes were solely to gain attention. It appeared to me that they were having a great deal of fun even though one member of the group practiced a bored expression and carried his hat in his hand.
I saw kids who had obviously spent time in the animal barns caring for their livestock. I saw couples with fingers intertwined and shy smiles on their faces. There were kids in utilitarian shorts, T-shirts and work boots. There were a few overdressed girls in layers of black that made me wonder how they hadn’t yet passed out from the stifling heat. There were shirtless boys with wiry bodies. There were kids of every age, shape and size wandering around unsupervised.
But this is the important part. There were no stories in the local newspaper of strangers harming any of these young people. There were no stories of kids committing vandalism. Though I venture a guess that many, if not most, of the boys and at least a few of the girls, owned rifles or other guns, not a single one opened fire and killed innocent people.
Not one.
I’ll let you think about that for a minute.
I know we have all read about the shooting in Colorado. We have read about far too many cases where someone has committed a horrendous crime and we have thought to ourselves, “What is this world coming to?”
Those of us older than, say 25 or so, have listened to the kids walking down our sidewalks and have shaken our heads at the language. It seems that every other word is one that was only uttered by riffraff not so long ago. The hairstyles and clothing make us cringe and long to yank up the drooping pants of the males and give them proper haircuts.
We bemoan all the time spent attending to electronic gadgets without realizing that those electronic gadgets are the keys to their future careers.
Yet here, in this little corner of our planet, it is still safe to let our children run free within the confines of the fairgrounds for one week of the year. I never heard that one word that is so pervasive in the language of our youth. Nobody harmed them and they harmed nobody.
To me, it just goes to prove my theory that most children, and indeed most people, are basically good. If these young people are our future then we have nothing to worry about.[[In-content Ad]]