My friends said it was the UNC Tar Heels losing in the ACC tournament that prompted the angry outburst, followed by the monologue on what was wrong with the young people of America. Having observed a couple of youngsters speeding down Glenwood Avenue (something those of us over, well 40, never do, of course) and then enduring an encounter in a fast-food joint where an unresponsive waitperson shorted me on ketchup, I launched into my Number Three speech, the one wherein I reckon that American youth is lazy, dim-witted and utterly hopeless. I closed the speech out with the pressing of a mock elevator button and the request: "Handbasket? 666 Hades Street, and step on it."

Then somebody called about Wade Edwards and his mother, Elizabeth Anania. Wade, a Broughton High student and son of Elizabeth and her husband John Edwards (both attorneys), was one of 10 finalists in a patriotic essay competition sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Voice of America. His topic: democracy and voting rights.

The kicker: Some 30 years earlier almost to the day, Wade’s mother had also been a finalist in a similar contest, writing under the topic, "Democracy: What It Means to Me."

Feeling the need to see if America really did have a chance (Pat Buchanan won the New Hampshire primary, for goodness sakes), I went to see Wade and Elizabeth. Ms. Anania had in hand her essay and Wade’s, and she’d found an itinerary of 30 years before of her trip from Tokyo, near her father’s military post, to Washington, where she and other contest finalists assembled. "This is mine," she said, handing over the essays. "And this is Wade’s. Your is better, Wade." (You just can’t beat mothers, can you?)

"My Mom has always been proud that she’s never missed a chance to vote," Wade said. He credited his parents’ strong interest in matters democratic with planting the seeds that sprouted this high school honor. "A lot of people don’t have that kind of parents." Indeed, Wade’s essay is about going to vote with his father. This is part of what he wrote about it: "I have always gone with my parents to vote. Sometimes lines are long. There are faces of old people and young people, voices of native North Carolinians in Southern drawls and voices of naturalized citizens with their foreign accents. There are people in fancy clothes and other dressed in overalls. Each has exactly the same one vote. Each has exactly the same say in the election. There is no place in America where equality means as much as in the voting booth." And here is what his mother had written 30 years before: "Representative democracy is Americanism. It is more than being born within the borders of the United States and more than having American parents. It is having, and believing in, the democratic ideals of freedom, equality, justice and humanity. It is feeling the obligation of citizenship to uphold these ideals. It is realizing that the success or the failure of democracy depends on you, the American citizen, regardless of your race, sex, color or creed."

Ms. Anania recalled that living on foreign military posts, kids "couldn’t get the records or buy the clothes that were hot stuff in the United States, but that the feeling of patriotism, of being American, was perhaps more intense in such places. When the assignment came, she let those feelings flow.

Wade also wrote as part of a class assignment, but is pretty matter of fact about it. "I just wrote what popped into my head, " he said. Nor does he claim to have cornered the market on political activism. His mother asked, "Didn’t you join the Young Democrats, Wade?" To which he replied, "Oh, I went to a meeting." (It is possible that being a young Democrat at Broughton is uncool and something one does not wish to announce on the notoriously conservative News & Observer editorial page.)

Is it barely possible that in the far corners of America, in other towns with fast-food ketchup shorters and teenage speeders and all the other dire signs of doom, that there are other Wades, just as 30 years ago there were other Elizabeth Ananias? Kids who will grow up to care and work for their candidates and never miss a vote?

Wade grins, and stands up for his fellow generational travelers: "I think we’ll be fine. Everybody as a teenager acts up some. But I think it will turn out all right."