‘Shocked’ by widow’s article

I must say that I was somewhat shocked and disappointed to see “Senior citizen/widow’s visit to the ‘Sexploratorium’” by Constance Garcia-Barrio in the Local this week (Nov. 5). I have been reading the Local on and off for years and have never seen anything like it before. It is something you would expect to see in the Daily News or the Philadelphia Weekly, not the Local.

I am surprised that a 69-year-old widow and former college professor would go to such a place and then write about what she bought. It is no wonder she was concerned that one of her former students might see her. She had a right to be embarrassed. I am sure that Marie Jones would have never run such an article.

Our entire society has become so coarse and crass with movies, cable TV and even teenagers on the street using such terrible language, not to mention all the nudity. There is just no shame anymore, and articles like this, instead of denouncing that horrible trend, merely add to it.

Abigail Hoffman

Chestnut Hill

Military industrial complex and JFK

Some people ask me why I still write about the murder of President Kennedy on this, the 52nd anniversary of that day, Nov. 22, l963. I’ll tell you why, because the forces in the U.S. then are as powerful today, if not more so, than they were on Nov. 22, 1963.

The united States has the biggest military budget by far in the world, bases all over the world, and drones firing on country after country. I refer to our military/industrial complex, first brought to our attention by none other than President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

JFK may have been a hawk when he assumed the presidency in 1961. But, like Lincoln, he grew in stature on the issues of his day – peace, nuclear war, the USSR, etc.

He took seriously Pope John XIII’s Papal Encyclical Pacem in Terris (Peace on Earth), the theme of which was that “peace was possible through trust and compassion with an enemy.” The Pope even sent Premier Khrushchev a papal medallion as a gesture of his own goodwill.

So in a speech at American University in May 1963 in the heat of the Cold War, JFK was asking us as a people to reexamine our attitudes in four areas: peace, the Cold War, Vietnam and freedom in the U.S.

And herein lay the confrontation between JFK and the military/industrial complex – Kennedy’s rejection of US globalization enforced on the world with American weapons favored by it. Powerful forces had other ideas regarding JFK’s desire to turn the trend toward war around.

Six months later, on Nov. 22, l963, John F. Kennedy was dead.

Lawrence H. Geller

Roxborough