Memorial Day Event Disrupted in Irvine

I was one of the 200 or so Orange Countians pushed, spit at, cursed, threatened or kicked by what a Times reporter called the “peaceful opposition” to our Memorial Day Celebration at Irvine City Hall (May 31).

Glad to have escaped with my shirt on, I was amazed to read your reporter’s account of the proceedings. Some of us saw the kind of ugliness we thought had died with the opposition to Southern civil rights marchers. Shouting “Turn on the ovens” at a Jewish local official and waving placards that read “Hang the Traitors,” these demonstrators reached a new low in Orange County’s already dangerously primitive political discourse.

American veterans from three wars, along with about 200 Orange County residents, came to support the effort. The food provided by people from Orange County went not to “needy families,” as the article suggested, but to children, many of them orphaned, in Nicaraguan refugee camps.

WILL SWAIM

Irvine