John Kerry's controversial 1970s Vietnam War protests have some Americans calling him a hero and others a traitor, but whether one likes Kerry or not, it is shameful to criticize him for protesting. His record of protest should, in fact, be viewed as an asset to the American nation, a nation that sets the world precedent for free expression of political sentiment.
Kerry's protests prove that he is a man of absolute principal who is willing to stand up for what he believes in. When the 800,000 troops that survived Vietnam came home, they knew that something was wrong with what the United States had done in Vietnam. Kerry helped lead their organization, the Vietnam Veterans against the War, in staging peaceful demonstrations.
The VVAW is an organization started by several Vietnam vets in 1967 to protest the war. Kerry's main role with the group was organizing the famous Dewey Canyon III event at the U.S. capitol in 1971. At this protest, Vietnam veterans walked, hobbled, wheeled and crutched their way past garbage cans into which they infamously tossed their military medals.
The object of the Dewey Canyon protest was to focus media and public attention on the fact that not just peace activists and students were against the war. It was veterans, men who had seen it first hand and knew that one million Vietnamese civilians had died as a result of the dropping of over three times as many explosives in Vietnam as in all of theaters of WWII.
Kerry protested the unjust U.S. involvement in Vietnam as a patriot, as a man crusading to make his country a better place. What more could the American people ask for in a presidential candidate than a man who was willing to risk his credibility and popularity to stand up against what was wrong?
Was John Kerry's protest unpatriotic? Like hell. The United States has historically been founded on protest. Imagine if in 1773 instead of tossing tea into the Atlantic Ocean, Bostonians had decided to sit around waving pretty United Kingdom flags because patriotism equated shutting up and falling in line.
Though Kerry's protest was not as monumental or as polarizing as the Boston Tea Party, it stemmed from belief in the same principals. The highest form of patriotism is a decisive moral effort to better one's country. The lowest form of cowardice is standing idly by when you believe there is a problem. John Kerry did not just stand by.
