May 4th 101
So, seems in my contract I’m supposed to do one of these
Anniversary things every spring. Last year
we had the Kurt Cobain’s Been Dead for Ten Years thing. Now we’re moving a little farther back…into
the groovy seventies! May 4th
either means something to you or it doesn’t.
Yes, it’s Cinco de Mayo Eve, but for many people, either because they
are historically conscious or live in the northeast corner of Ohio, it’s also a
day of solemn remembering for a tragedy that happened thirty-five years ago on
the campus of my alma mater, Kent State University.
Well, it used to be anyway.
Now it’s a day that’s been stolen and fenced, part and parcel, to any
socialist, liberal, neo-hippie, anti-establishment, pro-environment, maniac
Democrat, communist, pinko, gay and/or lesbian group with a persuasive enough
shriek. But more on that in a moment,
first, let’s do-oo-o the ti-i-ime warp agaiiiiin!
Almost a year after Woodstock, it’s springtime again and,
despite the nice weather, or maybe because of it, many separate groups of
students are bouncing around campus, and, out of some shared instinct or
sympathetic yearning, meld into one mass of fed-up youth. On April 30th, Nixon announced he
was sending troops into Cambodia. Somewhat put off by the fact that congress hadn’t
declared war on Cambodia and already dismayed at the abysmal stories coming out
of the current war in Vietnam, a group organized a protest for the next
day. A couple hundred students met in
the University Commons area to bury the constitution, symbolizing Nixon’s
circumvention of the law. Thousands of
other students came to either participate or at least watch the protest, and
the ensuing energetic pulse that ignites whenever independent youth defy
anything started to vibrate more loudly through the campus. The protesters spilled into downtown Kent,
moving towards Franklin and Water
streets where almost all of the bars are.
The crowd grew in number as the drunken Friday night crowd joined
up. Someone somewhere decided to bust
something, and eventually a full-scale riot of ejaculatory proportions consumed
the town. Storefront windows were
broken, students were hanging from stoplights, and the small-town police force
had as hard a time containing the unruly students as the Marines were holding
back Charlie.
The townspeople, good, God-fearing folk, were shocked,
titillated, and downright skeered that next time the marijuana-mad longhairs
they read about in the paper might go so far as to encroach upon their
property, knock down their front doors, and steal their children at knifepoint
in order to brainwash them against Mr. President. Rumors spread and the mayor called upon the
governor for help. The governor promised
to send in some reinforcements.
The next day, Saturday, many students helped to clean up the
downtown area, sweeping up glass and trying to reassure the townspeople that
they weren’t all drunken communist maniacs.
At the same time, though, another contingent of activists, some say
galvanized by radical out-of-towners who knew a good opportunity when they saw
it, started up another protest near the Army ROTC building on campus, which
was, for them, a symbol of the burgeoning military-industrial complex that was
claiming too many young men with frivolous wars. In the early evening, the protesters cleared
the building out and started to destroy it, throwing bricks through the windows
and then, after a few unsuccessful attempts, finally succeeded in setting the
building on fire. Some people even went
so far as to interfere with the fire department when they arrived.
Now the townspeople’s fear was justified, but the governor,
who arrived on Sunday to survey the scene for himself, decided to keep the
university open, thinking that the worst had passed. The National Guard had set up patrols, and
all the chaotic energy had seemed to subside.
Unfortunately, many students saw the presence of the National Guard as
either an insult or a challenge, and another anti-war demonstration was
organized, word-of-mouth, for the afternoon.
Somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 students assembled again in the large,
grassy field of the Commons, and their chanting incited the National Guard,
made up of mostly young soldiers who weren’t quite fit for duty in Vietnam or
others who were past their prime, to try to intervene. The guardsmen gave the order to disperse,
fearing another riot, and the protesters, fearing an infringement of their
right to assemble, responded with more indignant chants and insults. Some protesters threw stones at the
guardsmen, which prompted them to release canisters of tear gas around the
crowd. Nature intervened, however, and
the winds blew the tear gas away from the protesters. With their options limited, the guardsmen,
being ordered to enforce the Ohio Riot Act, raised their bayonets and marched
towards the crowd. The crowd moved back,
and some people, sensing the very real danger that things could get out of
control, decided to leave. Then a very
strange thing happened. The guardsmen
turned their backs on the angry crowd, marched up the gentle slope of the hill
towards Taylor Hall, and then turned and fired.
Sixty to seventy shots.
Automatic rifles. Americans
shooting Americans, which, hey, is nothing new, but this wasn’t a gunfight in
the back alleys of Chicago. This wasn’t the Draft Riots of the 1860s
where an entire city was burning and the riots needed to be quelled. This was a tool of the government enforcing
its will, right or wrong, on an opposing group of equally free people seeking
life, liberty and happiness. Two sides
of one coin, only one group had guns and the other had words. Hard to say which is more dangerous.
This could’ve been covered up. It sounds unbelievable, but the American
public at large would’ve liked to have believed anything else than that a group
of soldiers unmercifully unloaded on a group of kids. The red states were even redder than they are
now, and the stories that appeared in print the next day could’ve been worded
to describe the horrible action as a thing of necessity. But there were a few facts that were hard to
erase. First of all, of the four
students killed, only one—and this is a maybe—was part of the anti-war
demonstration. The others were regular
students walking around campus.
Clean-cut kids with swimming scholarships and nice girlfriends. They pulled bullets out of the walls of
Tri-Towers, a dorm complex at least a couple hundred yards away. The guardsmen weren’t really aiming, and as a
result, well, are you familiar with the term ‘friendly fire’?
Second, nobody—nobody—knew exactly what happened. The guardsmen wouldn’t fess up, and nobody
would admit to firing first or even giving the order or why. Thirty-five years have passed, and still, out
of the primordial ooze of a thousand theories and possibilities, no real
explanation has evolved.
Yes, time is working in reverse here. People get forgetful or just regress all
those horrible memories. Those who were
there in the crowd…well, they’ve got a reason to be angry, but with that anger
comes a license to exaggerate and point erroneous fingers. For some, the hatred has become total, a
consuming motivation to keep on living and keep up the simultaneous bragging
(“I was there!”) and bitching (“I was there!”).
There is history there in that spot, but there are no details.
So, the country, the government, the university, the city,
the students then and now are all left with the same question: What the hell
are we going to do about this?
Well, if you’re the university, you clam up. What? A massacre?
Here? Ha-ha! Never happened. By the way, we’re changing the
name of the
school. What? Yes. Kent State University
becomes Kent University. They only changed it my freshman year
back to
KSU, but I think that may have been mostly due to the outdated
logo. For the first two decades, the school tried
to disassociate themselves from the event by ignoring that it ever
happened. Kind of reflective of the
whole Vietnam
situation. Attendance slumped, and the
general scholastic vigor slowly waned until that semi-famous insult
finally
seemed apt: Kent Read, Kent Write, Kent State! But then we get a
new president, this old
feisty woman with bold plans. Let’s stop
running from this. It’s the nineties
now, and we can use this to our advantage.
New memorials were built, new events were planned. Embrace our
history! Let’s learn from the mistakes that happened
here, but since the Republicans are still in control of our funding,
let’s try
not to point any fingers, okay?
So now they have the May 4th Symposium every
year, usually centering around a topic like “Non-violent Conflict Resolution”
or “Healthy Dissension in Democracy,” something like that, and lots of money is
handed to lots of famous speakers who give lectures to sparsely-populated
auditoriums. I never knew one student
who went to one. But on the flipside,
aha…let’s give the radicals a little restitution. A new student organization was formed, the
May 4th Task Force. I know
what you’re thinking… “Task Force”? What do they do, covert infiltration? Divide and conquer? Black ops?
Originally, their purpose was to plan and execute a memorial event,
something solemn and tasteful. So every
year they break out the candles and everyone sits around at night on May 3rd
and meditates. It’s really a pretty
thing to see, all the candles lighting up faces across the now-vacant Blanket
Hill where they buried the constitution.
Of course, part of a vigil’s essence is that it is silent
and lonely, contemplative and pretty.
And for the task force, that’s not really enough. So, every year, the patchwork pants-clad,
white-man-dreadlock-sprouting, drum-circling radicals recruit more and more
members, and supplicate enough money from the Student Senate to put on some
kind of rally on May 4th. And
every year it has gotten more ridiculous as crackpots from around the country
hear about this and in turn ask to be part of the event…for a nominal fee, of
course.
Let’s have some folk bands, like those guys who were at Woodstock! Let’s pull Country Joe and his remaining Fish
out of whatever backwater swamp he’s living at!
Let’s get that girl who lived in a Sequoia for a year! Let’s get some Indians, I mean real live,
property-deprived Indians! And let’s get
some of those guys who were arrested at that WTO demonstration! Dude, you forgot the gays!
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the environment as much as the
next guy, and I don’t want it trampled.
I hate what happened to the Indians.
Globalization and unfair trade irk and scare me. And the gays…well, let’s just say I liked
that part in Mulholland Falls. But by picking out some of the most
pissed-off, inarticulate, liberal assholes who are past their prime and still
living their lives like Magical Mystery Tour just came out last week, they’ve essentially created a
circus, where all the issues and their most controversial proponents can be
paraded around like juggling bears.
There is no logic, no attempt at rational discourse, no goal of
education. And for this reason, no one
goes to the rally except freshmen and every hippie in the area who scraped
enough gas money to get there. There is
a choir, and it is being preached to.
It’s a pep rally, a chance for people to see others of similar beliefs. Some of these beliefs are valid, but most are
not. For one thing, what they all should
have learned is that the style of protest that became so popular in the sixties
turned out to be as effective as the style of warfare we tried to perpetrate in
Korea and Vietnam. The military learned from their mistakes—the
hippies didn’t.
And, as a result, no one’s memory has been preserved. No one can remember the names of the students
who were shot. No one can remember what
those who died had come to Kent
for in the first place—a liberal education.
No one wants to give up the spirit of protest that caused the whole
situation in the first place.
Am I saying lay down?
No. Am I saying, let the Red
States and their faith in the holy might of our armies keep on keeping on? No.
But for God’s sake, for history’s sake, for Allison, Jeffery, Sandra,
and William’s sake, let’s find something more effective. Vietnam,
for better or worse, is long gone, baby.
The US
got out of Saigon; it’s time for you to as well.
A mixed up myth turned touchstone is always dangerous. No one knows what really happened, but lots
of people like to think they do. And
while it keeps getting farther and farther away from our consciousness, I hope
that the basic lessons will someday be clearer to the eye: it takes two to start
a fight, and it takes only a second for something you thought you had control
over to escape and draw blood. Stop
letting emotions guide your politics, and stop letting your politics guide your
lifestyle. Life is too precious to waste
on ideas. This is something that goes
back to Cain and Abel or those monkeys in 2001,
whichever you prefer, but somehow it never sinks in. Ah, well.
You may say that I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.
For photographs of the day’s events, click here.
For more Kent State/Police State fun, click
here!