This Monday the children of the Font del Alba school carried out activities to dismiss the school year. One of them was to leave a message on the class album with a greeting or a drawing...  A ten-year-old girl drew a flag and a "viva". Nothing so strange. In the Catalan classrooms it's common for teachers to encourage children to draw stellar flags, write "Visca Catalunya!" or put little bows of a single (yellow) color. The problem with which the teacher was found is that the ten-year-old girl had drawn several Spanish flags. And the greeting that accompanied them was "¡viva España!".

Miss Miriam, the teacher, stopped thinking. Who knows what emotions they should have gone through? Indignation? Rage? Maybe fear that parents and teachers saw that forbidden symbol, indelibly messing up the yearbook of their class, and blame her for not having as energetic in the classroom with nationalist messages as it was on his facebook account?

The fact is that the teacher, as the girl declares, began to scream at her student, grabbing her by the shirt and pulling her (suppose that simply to separate her from the damaged yearbook) what made her fall to the ground and hit hard her back. Apart from the contusions and pain ("dorsolumbalgia" is described in the hospital injury section) the girl has an inguinal hernia that requires intervention, so that the fall to the ground had to be painful.

It could be considered an unfortunate accident produced by an unfortunate reaction if the teacher had not grabbed the girl by the neck (according to her statement and that of her parents at the hospital) and had expelled her in that unworthy form. They complete the part of chest pain and a probable lesion in the little finger of the right hand. Luckily, the hospital qualifies the injuries as mild. The girl's parents, however, have announced that they'll denounce the aggression of the teacher by criminal means, for which they have the support of the constitutionalist association S'ha Acabat!, as reported by Crónica Global.

At ten, a girl has many ways to say hello to summer. Maybe she's too young to do it from patriotism (something he's certainly copied from her parents) and of course she's too young to do it from nationalism (which her teacher preaches). But the fact is that this girl has already learned the difference between both. Patriotism is pride for the country in which one lives, and nationalism is similar. But nationalism requires an enemy, someone to hate.

Probably this girl would never have been an independentist. After all, a child does not draw Spanish flags if she has not seen her parent doing it at home. But now it will be a certainty. Every time this girl hears again about the "democratic mandate", the "people of peace" or the "smile revolution", she'll probably remember the teacher's hands on her neck and the visit to the pediatric unit of the Terrassa Hospital. Or perhaps, what runs through her like a chill is the memory of Miss Miriam reprobatory criying to her.

Surely the independence movement has lost a ten-year-old girl to her cause, and that's no small thing.