Kent State Memorial

Mean-spirited and reprehensible are certainly appropriate terms to describe the condemnation of the Kent State Student Memorial by the American Legion of Ohio.

How sad and disheartening it is to realize that there are still a large number of Americans who are so callous and hardhearted that they are unwilling to try and understand the spirit of righteous indignation that motivated those idealistic young people to stand up for what they believed was right in 1970.

The test of a true democracy is the ability of its citizens to influence the conduct of its government. In exercising their God-given constitutional rights to protest the immoral conduct of their government in Vietnam, these courageous young people succeeded in bringing the war to an end.

How many more young Americans and innocent Vietnamese would have been killed or maimed had it not been for those many brave young people who were willing to take the risk of being clubbed, beaten, jailed and, yes, even shot in an effort to end what they considered to be a senseless and dirty little war?

Would the atrocities of Nazi Germany have occurred if the young people at that time had possessed the courage and moral integrity to stand up and protest the barbaric behavior of their government?

How long would the war in Afghanistan continue if the young Russian college students would rise up in protest against their government’s uncivilized conduct there?

I hope this letter will be read by many of those college students and other young people of that era who were not willing to stand by and allow their government to trample on the principles that had made their country great. This memorial will not only be a tribute to those who died at Kent State but also to all those wonderful and idealistic young people who had the courage to stand up and change the course of their nation’s history and who saved the lives of many innocent people in the process.

ROBERT A. McKENNON

Hacienda Heights