A country built by protesters
Reading letters and comments sent to newspapers and news agencies, I find it distressing and amazing that lawful and peaceful protest for a cause is condemned and vilified. It’s as if being a protester is un-American and unpatriotic. Let’s take a serious look at our history.
Every November we celebrate a national holiday honoring a small group of protesters who were vilified and denounced as troublemakers in England in the early 1600s. They were protesting the official religion administered by the British Crown. Those protesters established a permanent settlement in North America, the roots of which are an integral part of our country.
Let’s consider the protesters who signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776, for whom we also celebrate a national holiday. We respectfully regard them as patriots and our Founding Fathers, but they were considered to be traitors and criminals by the British government. They carried their protests all the way to an armed revolution and forged a new country, initiated by protests over mismanagement of a valuable asset and ill treatment of citizens.
The vehement protests of anti-slavery organizations in the 19th century led to a solution to the scourge of human bondage, shamefully practiced in America for nearly 250 years.
Furthermore, the suffragettes, who labored for women’s equality, were vilified as troublemakers, often jailed for protesting against gender and political discrimination.
In more recent times, the anti-war protesters of the 1960s and 1970s who doggedly protested the Vietnam War proved to be absolutely correct in their reasons to speak out against that debacle. By all sensible analysis, we lost the conflict, and 58,000 names on the wall at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., remind all citizens of how misguided and disastrous that conflict proved to be.
I stand in utter amazement that a protest issue is honorable in the first person (i.e., “our protest”), but is dishonorable in the third person (i.e., “their protest”). How quickly so many Americans choose to ignore our own history of protest for causes we fervently believed to be righteous, and how fast they choose to disparage the protests of others.
Ronald J. Yamka
Canonsburg