Skrill Letter, Re-interpreted

Skrill Letter, Re-interpreted

The young people Stewart Skrill met at his John McCain booth sound as if they acted like impetuous youths, being impolite and expressing shallow thoughts. They were "predisposed to one mindset, one of emotion, not substance, and unaware of any facts."

It is certainly a shame that they had these attitudes, but at least their age might excuse in them what it does not in Mr. Skrill.

For Mr. Skrill and his party are guilty of the charges he lays on the kids. "Predisposed to one mindset" could explain Mr. Skrill's assigning blame for the kid's rudeness to the school they attend. Children either learn manners at home and conduct themselves politely in public or they don't.

Teachers who work with unmannerly children try to teach what was not learned at home. We are often unsuccessful in this, but we spend a lot more time dealing with these behaviors than Mr. Skrill did in his brief "booth-manning" experience.

A mind predisposed to "emotion" could describe large crowds at a political convention chanting "Drill, drill, drill" or John McCain blaming Barack Obama for the Wall Street meltdown.

A mindset without "substance" might have chosen the word "desecrate" to describe the act of attaching Obama stickers to a McCain sign. Something must first be sacred before it can be desecrated, and a sign is just a sign.

It isn't a person being water-boarded. It's not a polar ice cap or the ozone layer. And maybe those kids know that there are important issues to be settled in this election.

Not to excuse mob behavior, Mr. Skrill, but isn't it amazing that white kids are supporting a black man to be president? These are kids who have grown up, not in a country living up to its highest ideals, as you and I did, but one that has been tarnished and muddied, whose moral capital has been squandered. Why would they want John McCain to continue this madness?

"Shallow thoughts" might describe a woman who repeatedly answers questions about her foreign policy experience with descriptions of the view from her windows.

"Shallow thoughts" describe the mental acuity of a person who seriously thinks that schools brainwash kids to act without thought or consideration. If "brainwashing kids" means teaching kids that Andrew Jackson ignored the Supreme Court ruling about the Cherokee's right to keep their land, herded them west anyway, and said "Let John Marshall enforce his own ruling;" if "brainwashing" means teaching kids that millions of European Americans, New Englanders and New Yorkers as well as Southerners, were complicit in the slave trade and the institution of slavery; if brainwashing means teaching kids that the Industrial Revolution that freed all of us from plowing fields behind oxen also began the pollution of the planet that threatens the earth's survival today: then the social studies teachers I know are guilty as charged.

But don't you dare equate education with abuse. That is a sickening charge to level, especially in this year, in this community. Teachers are not child abusers. We are working to help each child grow up well-adjusted, well-rounded, thoughtful, productive, moral, and community-minded.

I saw a "Stewart Skrill for Legislature" lawn sign this morning. If Mr. Skrill's letter to The Herald was a fair measure of his ability to reason, I'd say it reveals him to be someone "predisposed to one mindset, one of emotion, not substance, and unaware of any facts."

Walter H. Garner, Jr.

West Brookfield