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Following Kennedy’s advice about being liberal

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I would like to respond to the letter from Ronald Edward of Sun City West, (“Warns of liberals ‘taking over’” Peoria Independent, July 8, 2020), in which Mr Edward laments “our past history deleted.”

By this, I can only assume he is referring to the removal of Confederate statues and other monuments of the Confederacy. First, in this country, we erect monuments and statues to honor the heroes of our past. Any Confederate soldier is a traitor who had sworn to destroy the United States and took up arms against American soldiers.

I wouldn’t expect Mr Edward to defend statues of Adolf Hitler or Mussolini put up in this country, even though these men played an important part in our history. The appropriate places for these artifacts is a museum, where the rest of history is preserved and studied. Another important fact to remember is that most of these statues and memorials were not erected immediately after the Civil War. No, they were put up many years later, when white southerners were trying to exert dominance over African Americans through the imposition of Jim Crow laws and a campaign of terror led by the Ku Klux Klan.

Finally, Mr. Edward decries the impending takeover of this country of “the liberals”. Well, I would like to end this with a famous quote by John F. Kennedy during a speech he made while accepting his party’s nomination for president in 1960: “if by a liberal, they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people — their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties — someone who believes that we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a liberal, then I’m proud to say that I’m a liberal. I can think of worse things to be called.

Editor's note: Gregory Cravens is a Peoria resident.