<\/p>\n
So, seems in my contract I’m supposed to do one of these Well, it used to be anyway. <\/p>\n Almost a year after Woodstock, it’s springtime again and, The townspeople, good, God-fearing folk, were shocked, The next day, Saturday, many students helped to clean up the Now the townspeople’s fear was justified, but the governor, Sixty to seventy shots. This could’ve been covered up.\u00a0 It sounds unbelievable, but the American Second, nobody\u2014nobody\u2014knew exactly what happened.\u00a0 The guardsmen wouldn’t fess up, and nobody Yes, time is working in reverse here.\u00a0 People get forgetful or just regress all So, the country, the government, the university, the city, Well, if you’re the university, you clam up.\u00a0 What? A massacre? So now they have the May 4th<\/sup> Symposium every Of course, part of a vigil’s essence is that it is silent Let’s have some folk bands, like those guys who were at Woodstock!\u00a0 Let’s pull Country Joe and his remaining Fish Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the environment as much as the And, as a result, no one’s memory has been preserved.\u00a0 No one can remember the names of the students Am I saying lay down? A mixed up myth turned touchstone is always dangerous.\u00a0 No one knows what really happened, but lots For photographs of the day’s events<\/em>, click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n
\nAnniversary things every spring.\u00a0 Last year
\nwe had the Kurt Cobain’s Been Dead for Ten Years thing<\/a>.\u00a0 Now we’re moving a little farther back…into
\nthe groovy seventies!\u00a0 May 4th<\/sup>
\neither means something to you or it doesn’t.
\nYes, it’s Cinco de Mayo Eve, but for many people, either because they
\nare historically conscious or live in the northeast corner of Ohio, it’s also a
\nday of solemn remembering for a tragedy that happened thirty-five years ago on
\nthe campus of my alma mater, Kent State University.<\/p>\n
\nNow it’s a day that’s been stolen and fenced, part and parcel, to any
\nsocialist, liberal, neo-hippie, anti-establishment, pro-environment, maniac
\nDemocrat, communist, pinko, gay and\/or lesbian group with a persuasive enough
\nshriek.\u00a0 But more on that in a moment,
\nfirst, let’s do-oo-o the ti-i-ime warp agaiiiiin!<\/em><\/p>\n
\ndespite the nice weather, or maybe because of it, many separate groups of
\nstudents are bouncing around campus, and, out of some shared instinct or
\nsympathetic yearning, meld into one mass of fed-up youth.\u00a0 On April 30th<\/sup>, Nixon announced he
\nwas sending troops into Cambodia.\u00a0 Somewhat put off by the fact that congress hadn’t
\ndeclared war on Cambodia and already dismayed at the abysmal stories coming out
\nof the current war in Vietnam, a group organized a protest for the next
\nday.\u00a0 A couple hundred students met in
\nthe University Commons area to bury the constitution, symbolizing Nixon’s
\ncircumvention of the law.\u00a0 Thousands of
\nother students came to either participate or at least watch the protest, and
\nthe ensuing energetic pulse that ignites whenever independent youth defy
\nanything started to vibrate more loudly through the campus.\u00a0 The protesters spilled into downtown Kent,
\nmoving towards Franklin and Water
\nstreets where almost all of the bars are.
\nThe crowd grew in number as the drunken Friday night crowd joined
\nup.\u00a0 Someone somewhere decided to bust
\nsomething, and eventually a full-scale riot of ejaculatory proportions consumed
\nthe town.\u00a0 Storefront windows were
\nbroken, students were hanging from stoplights, and the small-town police force
\nhad as hard a time containing the unruly students as the Marines were holding
\nback Charlie.<\/p>\n
\ntitillated, and downright skeered that next time the marijuana-mad longhairs
\nthey read about in the paper might go so far as to encroach upon their
\nproperty, knock down their front doors, and steal their children at knifepoint
\nin order to brainwash them against Mr. President.\u00a0 Rumors spread and the mayor called upon the
\ngovernor for help.\u00a0 The governor promised
\nto send in some reinforcements.<\/p>\n
\ndowntown area, sweeping up glass and trying to reassure the townspeople that
\nthey weren’t all drunken communist maniacs.
\nAt the same time, though, another contingent of activists, some say
\ngalvanized by radical out-of-towners who knew a good opportunity when they saw
\nit, started up another protest near the Army ROTC building on campus, which
\nwas, for them, a symbol of the burgeoning military-industrial complex that was
\nclaiming too many young men with frivolous wars.\u00a0 In the early evening, the protesters cleared
\nthe building out and started to destroy it, throwing bricks through the windows
\nand then, after a few unsuccessful attempts, finally succeeded in setting the
\nbuilding on fire.\u00a0 Some people even went
\nso far as to interfere with the fire department when they arrived.<\/p>\n
\nwho arrived on Sunday to survey the scene for himself, decided to keep the
\nuniversity open, thinking that the worst had passed.\u00a0 The National Guard had set up patrols, and
\nall the chaotic energy had seemed to subside.
\nUnfortunately, many students saw the presence of the National Guard as
\neither an insult or a challenge, and another anti-war demonstration was
\norganized, word-of-mouth, for the afternoon.
\nSomewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 students assembled again in the large,
\ngrassy field of the Commons, and their chanting incited the National Guard,
\nmade up of mostly young soldiers who weren’t quite fit for duty in Vietnam or
\nothers who were past their prime, to try to intervene.\u00a0 The guardsmen gave the order to disperse,
\nfearing another riot, and the protesters, fearing an infringement of their
\nright to assemble, responded with more indignant chants and insults.\u00a0 Some protesters threw stones at the
\nguardsmen, which prompted them to release canisters of tear gas around the
\ncrowd.\u00a0 Nature intervened, however, and
\nthe winds blew the tear gas away from the protesters.\u00a0 With their options limited, the guardsmen,
\nbeing ordered to enforce the Ohio Riot Act, raised their bayonets and marched
\ntowards the crowd.\u00a0 The crowd moved back,
\nand some people, sensing the very real danger that things could get out of
\ncontrol, decided to leave.\u00a0 Then a very
\nstrange thing happened.\u00a0 The guardsmen
\nturned their backs on the angry crowd, marched up the gentle slope of the hill
\ntowards Taylor Hall, and then turned and fired.<\/p>\n
\nAutomatic rifles.\u00a0 Americans
\nshooting Americans, which, hey, is nothing new, but this wasn’t a gunfight in
\nthe back alleys of Chicago.\u00a0 This wasn’t the Draft Riots of the 1860s
\nwhere an entire city was burning and the riots needed to be quelled.\u00a0 This was a tool of the government enforcing
\nits will, right or wrong, on an opposing group of equally free people seeking
\nlife, liberty and happiness. \u00a0Two sides
\nof one coin, only one group had guns and the other had words.\u00a0 Hard to say which is more dangerous.<\/p>\n
\npublic at large would’ve liked to have believed anything else than that a group
\nof soldiers unmercifully unloaded on a group of kids.\u00a0 The red states were even redder than they are
\nnow, and the stories that appeared in print the next day could’ve been worded
\nto describe the horrible action as a thing of necessity.\u00a0 But there were a few facts that were hard to
\nerase.\u00a0 First of all, of the four
\nstudents killed, only one\u2014and this is a maybe\u2014was part of the anti-war
\ndemonstration.\u00a0 The others were regular
\nstudents walking around campus.
\nClean-cut kids with swimming scholarships and nice girlfriends.\u00a0 They pulled bullets out of the walls of
\nTri-Towers, a dorm complex at least a couple hundred yards away.\u00a0 The guardsmen weren’t really aiming, and as a
\nresult, well, are you familiar with the term \u2018friendly fire’?<\/p>\n
\nwould admit to firing first or even giving the order or why.\u00a0 Thirty-five years have passed, and still, out
\nof the primordial ooze of a thousand theories and possibilities, no real
\nexplanation has evolved.<\/p>\n
\nthose horrible memories.\u00a0 Those who were
\nthere in the crowd…well, they’ve got a reason to be angry, but with that anger
\ncomes a license to exaggerate and point erroneous fingers.\u00a0 For some, the hatred has become total, a
\nconsuming motivation to keep on living and keep up the simultaneous bragging
\n(“I was there!”) and bitching (“I was there!”).
\nThere is history there in that spot, but there are no details.<\/p>\n
\nthe students then and now are all left with the same question: What the hell
\nare we going to do about this?<\/p>\n
\nHere?\u00a0 Ha-ha! Never happened.\u00a0 By the way, we’re changing the
\nname of the
\nschool.\u00a0 What? Yes.\u00a0 Kent State University
\nbecomes Kent University.\u00a0 They only changed it my freshman year
\nback to
\nKSU, but I think that may have been mostly due to the outdated
\nlogo.\u00a0 For the first two decades, the school tried
\nto disassociate themselves from the event by ignoring that it ever
\nhappened.\u00a0 Kind of reflective of the
\nwhole Vietnam
\nsituation.\u00a0 Attendance slumped, and the
\ngeneral scholastic vigor slowly waned until that semi-famous insult
\nfinally
\nseemed apt: Kent Read, Kent Write, Kent State!\u00a0 But then we get a
\nnew president, this old
\nfeisty woman with bold plans.\u00a0 Let’s stop
\nrunning from this.\u00a0 It’s the nineties
\nnow, and we can use this to our advantage.
\nNew memorials were built, new events were planned.\u00a0 Embrace our
\nhistory!\u00a0 Let’s learn from the mistakes that happened
\nhere, but since the Republicans are still in control of our funding,
\nlet’s try
\nnot to point any fingers, okay?<\/p>\n
\nyear, usually centering around a topic like “Non-violent Conflict Resolution”
\nor “Healthy Dissension in Democracy,” something like that, and lots of money is
\nhanded to lots of famous speakers who give lectures to sparsely-populated
\nauditoriums.\u00a0 I never knew one student
\nwho went to one.\u00a0 But on the flipside,
\naha…let’s give the radicals a little restitution.\u00a0 A new student organization was formed, the
\nMay 4th<\/sup> Task Force.\u00a0 I know
\nwhat you’re thinking… “Task Force”? What do they do, covert infiltration?\u00a0 Divide and conquer?\u00a0 Black ops?
\nOriginally, their purpose was to plan and execute a memorial event,
\nsomething solemn and tasteful.\u00a0 So every
\nyear they break out the candles and everyone sits around at night on May 3rd<\/sup>
\nand meditates.\u00a0 It’s really a pretty
\nthing to see, all the candles lighting up faces across the now-vacant Blanket
\nHill where they buried the constitution.<\/p>\n
\nand lonely, contemplative and pretty.
\nAnd for the task force, that’s not really enough.\u00a0 So, every year, the patchwork pants-clad,
\nwhite-man-dreadlock-sprouting, drum-circling radicals recruit more and more
\nmembers, and supplicate enough money from the Student Senate to put on some
\nkind of rally on May 4th<\/sup>.\u00a0 And
\nevery year it has gotten more ridiculous as crackpots from around the country
\nhear about this and in turn ask to be part of the event…for a nominal fee, of
\ncourse.<\/p>\n
\nout of whatever backwater swamp he’s living at!
\nLet’s get that girl who lived in a Sequoia for a year!\u00a0 Let’s get some Indians, I mean real live,
\nproperty-deprived Indians!\u00a0 And let’s get
\nsome of those guys who were arrested at that WTO demonstration!\u00a0 Dude, you forgot the gays!<\/p>\n
\nnext guy, and I don’t want it trampled.
\nI hate what happened to the Indians.
\nGlobalization and unfair trade irk and scare me.\u00a0 And the gays…well, let’s just say I liked
\nthat part in Mulholland<\/em> <\/em>Falls<\/em>.\u00a0 But by picking out some of the most
\npissed-off, inarticulate, liberal assholes who are past their prime and still
\nliving their lives like <\/em>Magical Mystery Tour<\/em> just came out last week, they’ve essentially created a
\ncircus, where all the issues and their most controversial proponents can be
\nparaded around like juggling bears.
\nThere is no logic, no attempt at rational discourse, no goal of
\neducation.\u00a0 And for this reason, no one
\ngoes to the rally except freshmen and every hippie in the area who scraped
\nenough gas money to get there.\u00a0 There is
\na choir, and it is being preached to.
\nIt’s a pep rally, a chance for people to see others of similar beliefs.\u00a0 Some of these beliefs are valid, but most are
\nnot.\u00a0 For one thing, what they all should
\nhave learned is that the style of protest that became so popular in the sixties
\nturned out to be as effective as the style of warfare we tried to perpetrate in
\nKorea and Vietnam.\u00a0 The military learned from their mistakes\u2014the
\nhippies didn’t.<\/p>\n
\nwho were shot.\u00a0 No one can remember what
\nthose who died had come to Kent
\nfor in the first place\u2014a liberal education.
\nNo one wants to give up the spirit of protest that caused the whole
\nsituation in the first place.<\/p>\n
\nNo.\u00a0 Am I saying, let the Red
\nStates and their faith in the holy might of our armies keep on keeping on?\u00a0 No.
\nBut for God’s sake, for history’s sake, for Allison, Jeffery, Sandra,
\nand William’s sake, let’s find something more effective.\u00a0 Vietnam,
\nfor better or worse, is long gone, baby.
\nThe US
\ngot out of Saigon; it’s time for you to as well.<\/p>\n
\nof people like to think they do.\u00a0 And
\nwhile it keeps getting farther and farther away from our consciousness, I hope
\nthat the basic lessons will someday be clearer to the eye: it takes two to start
\na fight, and it takes only a second for something you thought you had control
\nover to escape and draw blood.\u00a0 Stop
\nletting emotions guide your politics, and stop letting your politics guide your
\nlifestyle.\u00a0 Life is too precious to waste
\non ideas.\u00a0 This is something that goes
\nback to Cain and Abel or those monkeys in 2001<\/em>,
\nwhichever you prefer, but somehow it never sinks in.\u00a0 Ah, well.
\nYou may say that I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.<\/p>\n