Note to all parents: Please don't let your kids lose this

Matthew Morison (with Paolo Szot), "You've Got to be Carefully Taught", from South Pacific

You've got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You've got to be taught
From year to year,
It's got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade,
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught before it's too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You've got to be carefully taught!

It's easy to forget, when you see teabaggers foaming at the mouth on cable news about birth certificates and lazy unemployed people and immigrant drug dealers and treasonous liberals, that even these most vile of people were once children.

Santa Says is a blog by a guy who seems to do seasonal work as a mall Santa, who posts his experiences dealing with children at Christmas time. What may surprise you is that for all that Christmas is the season of unbridled avarice (cf: Jean Shepherd), children really do get what's going on the world around them:

Today a boy gave me a small baggie of coins that were his own funds and when asked he said he wanted me to use them to buy toys for kids that might not get any. In fact I have received such gifts before from children But this year I have gotten 2 to 3 times as many and I believe that even young children can be aware of hard times for others and respond with compassion and touching gestures especially involving other kids.

A 5 year old girl ends her letter to me, “Don’t forget about the poor people. Take one ting you would give to me and give it to a poor child!” Alexander gives me a few buttons and says, “These came off of my Buzz Lightyear. I thought you could use them to make another boy a new Buzz.”

Morgan writes, ” Pleas bring all the sick kids a toy or a book and something to eat.” Breanne, “I now there are lots of kids out there that do not have iney toy’s so if you Do not have unaf of toy’s pleys giv those ones that Do not hav toy’s”

After 9-11 one youngster asked me to “take toys to the children of the terrorists so they won’t hate us so much”.

There's a journey from being children like these to being the kind of willfully ignorant, hate-filled lunatic that just elected what will be perhaps the most loathsome House of Representatives in this nation's history. Your children don't have to take that journey. You can set them on a different path. The raw material is already there.