Death In Ohio

I was forcibly reminded today that yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the Kent State massacre in Ohio. To my shame, I had forgotten the date. But not the event.

On May 4, 1970, armed Ohio National Guard troops who had been mobilized by Republican Governor Jim Rhodes confronted a group of students on the campus of Kent State University in Kent, Ohio. The students were protesting the American bombing of Cambodia, a neutral country. It was a major escalation of the Vietnam War.

Members of the Guard shot four students to death and wounded 9 others for exercising their First Amendment rights. Governor Rhodes denounced the protesters as terrorists, comparing them to communists, Nazis and the KKK, and calling them "the worst type of people that we harbor in America."

Say what? These were Americans exercising their rights. But Richard Nixon was president, and protest was not well tolerated.

I am aware that the Constitution gives us the right peaceably to assemble, and that passions were high at Kent State. The mayor of Kent and officers of the university had been spooked by rumors of everything from LSD in the water supply to plans to blow up the ROTC building.

The National Guard continues to deny any order to fire. Some of the guardsmen had been pelted with bricks and pieces of concrete. Some claimed they were responding to small-arms fire, others to reports of a rooftop sniper.

In fear or anger they fired indiscriminately, and 13 people, some of whom weren't involved at all, were hit.

Most of us who were active in what we naively called the Revolution abhorred violence. Kent State shocked us deeply and changed the protest movement in America. We had to decide how we would respond to the use of force.

One of our major goals was to get American soldiers out of Southeast Asia; but now we had a new concern. If they did come home, would the president turn them loose on us?


--- Diogenes, 5/5/20