Monday, May 4, 2020

Kent State - Fifty Years

The only good thing you could say about the two major Americans wars of this century, the Iraq War  and the Afghanistan War, was that while you may have been be called unpatriotic for being against them, at least you won't get massacred for it. That's exactly what happened to four students at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, fifty years ago today - Monday, May 4, 1970.
A massive protest on the Kent State campus had begun three days earlier after President Nixon widened the war in Vietnam by bombing Cambodia in an attempt to go after Viet Cong guerillas taking refuge over the border. In an attempt to maintain order in Kent, Ohio governor James Rhodes - who detested the antiwar demonstrators - sent the state militia onto the campus on May 2. University officials attempted to ban the protest set for the following Monday, but two thousand demonstrators showed up anyway. The militia tried to control the crowd with tear gas, which led to a riot. In short order, shots were fired at the demonstrators, and four students were killed with twelve wounded.  I wrote on this blog a more detailed account a decade ago of what happened on that spring day in 1970, and I only bring it up again today because, first of all, a fifty-year anniversary is a major milestone, and secondly, we now have someone in the White House who has a problem with public dissent and would go farther than Nixon or Rhodes ever would have gone in order to stamp it out.
I was only four years old when the Kent State massacre took place, but it always infuriated me that anyone even would even attempt to curtail the right of free speech with weapons in the United States of America.  And in the aftermath of Kent State,  the exercise of the right to protest fell by the wayside for a long time when it became apparent that speaking out could get yourself killed. :-(

Once again, remember today the fourth of May.

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