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03/28/2005: "Kent State and Jackson State"

In Memory: Alison Krause, Sandra Scheuer, Jeffrey Miller, William Schroeder, Phillip Gibbs, James Green
Killed at Kent State, Ohio May 4, 1970, and Jackson State, Mississippi May 14, 1970.
These six young men and women were my peers, my contemporaries, and though I have never met any of them, they have lived in my heart for 35 years. These six people were murdered by the government of the US and the states of Ohio and Mississippi for no crime other than their being young. The Five were college students, one, James Green a High School student just walking home from work.

Let it go, people have said to me, Kent State, Jackson State are ancient history. Well allow an old man his moment, let me tell you a story, a story about youth, power, anger, and arrogance. I feel it is important, important in this time of homeland security, color coded alert levels, imperialist wars around the world, a divided population and great power and arrogance.

The government of the US, the most powerful government in the world was engaged as an occupying army halfway around the world. We were told we were doing this to bring the benefits of democracy to the people of that country and to protect them from a brutal evil regime. Many people here. including most of the young people didn’t buy the argument, they felt that the war was being fought for other reasons. Many of us spent most of our time trying to end this war.

I am a veteran of the war in Vietnam. I served my country on the domestic front, I gave of myself, gave many years of my youth in an attempt to steer the foreign policy of this country into another direction. We brought down two presidents. Lyndon Johnson, elected by the largest landslide in history, was forced to not run again by the opposition to the war. Richard Nixon was driven by paranoia to enemies lists and break-ins and eventually out of office.

In the month following the Kent State murders every college in the nation went out on strike. In the only nation wide student strike in this country’s history, 100 schools a day joined the fight. 536 schools were shut down completely, 51 of them for the rest of the year. We did this without the internet, without unlimited long distance, cell phones, cable television. We forced the nation to deal with the reality of a nation killing its children.

The governor of Ohio, a man named Rhodes, said publicly that these students were;

“...worse than the communists...the worst type of people we harbor in America...we're going to ERADICATE THE PROBLEM!"

The Ohio National Guard General Canterbury released a number of lies to cover up the murder, all of them later proved false. He said a sniper shot at the guardsman, then said the students were 3 feet away charging the guardsmen, the then said there were deadly objects being thrown, later he denied their was an order to shoot and that the guardsmen did it on their own.

All of this was proven false by later investigations. It is now agreed that the guardsmen were given an order to shoot over 67 rounds into a group of legally congregated students who were over 300 yards away, killing 4 and wounding many more permanently paralyzing Dean Kahler.

At Jackson State, they opened fire into a student dormitory. Because this was a black college they didn’t even bother to lie to cover it up. They just did it.

The newspaper letters and editorials of the day called for “shooting more of them down”, as we expressed our outrage and solidarity with the soldiers, the Vietnamese people and the murdered students.

I am not sorry that we protested, I am sorry that somehow, when my generation grew up and became the majority of society we somehow have allowed the same kind of immorality to continue.

I naively believed at the time that the revolution was just around the corner, that this corrupt, unfair, racist, sexist system could not endure. Well it has, and many of my generation are now a part of the problem. Perhaps they always were. The contradiction is that today, with all of the global communication and media available, we all feel isolated.

But we are not more isolated, we are less isolated. The opportunity here for us to work together to change the evil this government does in our name, with our money, with our children and friends is huge.

That is the reason I remember May of 1970. My world changed that year. I still mourn the dead, but I remember what they believed in.