Hi George,

I must respond to one of my heroes, Paul Gaston. We're apparently discussing apples and eggplants. The image that he references, depicted below, is a symbol. It is not an X, but a banning symbol. It is permissable precisely because it does not represent anything we would recognize as a human being. The second grader's image was a picture of a smirking human being effaced with a crude red X. I was not describing the symbol below, nor was Mr. Schilling.

My larger point was and is that seven-year-old children should not be involved in any politics beyond picking teams and electing their class officers. People who indoctrinate their young children in their adult views do them a disservice. There are many such out there of all political stripes. When I was a student at Venable school, Paul Gaston was walking a picket line to end segregation in public accomodations in Charlottesville. There weren't very many people willing to do what he and a few others did, whatever their deeply held beliefs. When Paul Gaston was beaten bloody by racist thugs, I knew about it because he was my neighbor. My parents didn't try to keep knowledge of it from me and my brothers, but they didn't talk about it in front of us. We knew he was a brave man and the people who beat him weren't nice. That was enough.We really wouldn't have understood the fine points of moral courage at that young age, and I was five years older than a second grader.

Of course I don't know what the Gastons told their young children (younger than me) about that at the time, but my guess is that they tried not to alarm them. Of course, they probably didn't tell them that their father was a hero, but that would have been the truth.

Let's leave children as much of their innocence as the horrendous pressures of the commercialism and hucksterism our culture endorses will permit. No one, I maintain, has the wisdom or the moral right to attempt to mold the minds of children who have not fully attained the age of reason. Even in Virginia, you don't execute seven-year-olds yet, so that would seem to represent some sort of recognition that they are not quite responsible, that they need some time to ripen.

Page Nelson (electronic mail, December 3, 2004)

Editor's Note: I myself added the symbol above as an example of the images which began appearing to oppose Bush's election. The "X" to which Paul Gaston, Page Nelson and Rob Schilling are all refering can be found in Jeff Rossman's Comments on Rob Schilling, Venable School and the Bill of Rights. For Paul Gaston's original response, see Paul Gaston Comments About the Schilling Affair.