Little Eyes Are Watching!

I've written pretty much the same column before.  Even indicted my childhood chum here before.  But some stories are worth telling again.

I must have been about 10.  I was attending a high school basketball game and sitting on the balcony with my friend Jimmy Greenway.   We were sitting right over the main entrance to the gym and as people would enter, we would drop popcorn on them.

Keep in mind this was the early 60's, when "big" hair was all the rage.  We were generally aiming for those bouffant hairdo's.  You had to time it just right to get them as they walked by.  We hit a few.

A woman with a small son-he was maybe 4-sitting in the stands behind us turned to her son and said "don't turn out like them."

It shocked me.  Bothered me badly (obviously, since I remember it so distinctly 50 years later).  And it changed me.

Young and old, let me remind you of an absolute fact:  Somewhere, sometime someone little is looking at you, watching how you behave.  

It might be someone you know.  It might be a complete stranger.   But they are modeling their own behavior after yours.  If they know you and admire you, they might dream of being just like you.

I generally like Charles Barkley.  I liked the way he played the game.  He has a great sense of humor and is an excellent basketball commentator.  But when he declared that he was "nobody's role model," he lost me.

He may not choose to be a role model, but he is.   When a professional athlete admits to an extramarital affair, those that admire that athlete just inched closer to accepting that as normal behavior.  When a college athlete describes an incident as consensual sex, it becomes a little more acceptable to too many people.

I hear coaches tell their players about this stuff all the time.  I hear them say "when you are in the community, you are representing yourself, your team, your family."

I guarantee you that there is somebody looking at every member of the MHS and AHS state championship football teams and dreaming of being "just like them."  In every way. 

How do you act when you are in line to pick up a burger?   Do you treat the clerk with respect?  Are you patient?  Do you offer someone that is struggling your place in line?

Or do you do like I saw a couple of older guys do last weekend at the movie?  When told that they were in the wrong wing of the theater, they acted as though the teenage ticket-checker had insulted them.  One guy jabbed his straw down in his popcorn with such force that he spilled part of the contents.  That one was laughable (and I did laugh).

Maybe we learn how NOT to act from watching someone else.  But I never wanted to be that person so when I heard what that young mother told her son, I resolved to change.  

I want to walk-the-walk.  I want to be that person that behaves admirably, respectfully all the time; sometimes especially when I don't think anybody is watching.

Little eyes are watching you.  And copying you.  And if you don't watch out, they are going to grow up to be just like you.

What would you have them to be?