To The Reader’s Forum:

Some adolescent or perhaps older immature person arranged some objects in a parking lot in the shape of a swastika. It made the front page top story in the Post Journal and maybe ignited a movement to repeal the first amendment or maybe the whole Constitution and conduct a global witch hunt complete with burnings at the stake for thought crime — or at least calls for such by moral exhibitionists.

When I was in junior high school, far closer than now to World War II, I had a classmate who was into Nazism. He was a moron. One day the World War II veteran teacher lost his temper and threw a book at him. A crucial aspect of intellectual maturation is realizing that some things are serious and not appropriate material for adolescent attention getting or eccentricity.

The swastika is a simple design, easily and independently created over and over and was found here and there all over the world long before there was a Germany, let alone a Nazi Germany. It is possible the kid in Jamestown didn’t even know what a Nazi was or that World War II even happened. I suspect there are young people that ignorant today.

In the 1980s I met a woman from the Hudson valley who owned a rest home “for old Communists. They have suffered enough.” Of course Communists were just as dedicated to the violent destruction of the United States as Nazis were and they murdered and tortured even more people and for a much longer time. But they had suffered enough while Nazis in their 90’s were still being sought and prosecuted.

Today we have a community paroxysm over the mere sight of a swastika while we have socialists running for president of the United States.

Norman Carlson

Busti