A Winner or a Loser?

It only took 48 seconds to change  the 18-year-old, Miss Teen South Carolina, Lauren Caitlin Upton’s life forever.

When asked the question, “Recent polls have shown a fifth of Americans can’t locate the U.S. on a world map. Why do you think that is?”, Miss Upton gained notoriety she never wanted.

Thanks to YouTube and the blogosphere, she went from a contestant on the popular Miss Teen USA pageant on Friday to a YouTube phenomenon with a video that now has more than 4 million views. 

Her answer started out normal, as she reworded the sentence slowly as she began thinking about the answer, until she could no longer fake the slowness and had to answer.  And so was born a hodge podge group of sentences that truly made absolutely no sense. Something about it being her belief that a group of “U.S. Americans don’t have maps” and the way to alleviate that would be to help the educational efforts in South Africa and “the Iraq.”

I feel terrible for the girl really. I mean, seriously – how would you have answered it? I mean, I would want to say “Because lots of American’s are stupid.” but yeah, I’m thinking that probably wouldn’t have won her any awards. So she stumbled, and she answered the question incorrectly by drawing a South Africa connection (hey some live here too! and we should help them) and has it ever occured to anyone that the fifth of Americans that cannot locate the U.S. on a world map, might be the fifth of American’s who do not speak English, come from another country or otherwise are not a “true” American?

Thankfully, someone else felt sorry for Caitlin, and on Tuesday she appeared on the “Today Show” for a do-over of the question, so she could prove she is not ignorant and stupid as so many were already believing.  What a shame really, because she’s just a girl. A normal, pretty faced girl, who on the spot flubbed her answer. Yeesh. Does it matter that much?

“Everything did come at me at once,” she told Matt Lauer and Ann Curry on the “Today Show.” “I was overwhelmed and I made a mistake. Everybody makes mistakes. I’m human.”

Miss Upton is a graduate of Lexington High School and even took college-prep and honors courses according to her former principal.

All I’ve got to say, is she is very pretty, and people need to give her a chance. She is only 18 years old. She has a lifetime ahead of her to come up with answers to why American’s are stupid. Does it matter that she messed it up? I don’t really think it does. Did it hurt you or I? Nope. I don’t believe it did.