[Mb-civic] [Mb-hair] MUST READ: Why Kent State is important today

[Michael Butler]

Bill,
Thanks for sending this. Takes me back to then when I was summoned to the
White House to explain what was happening with the young. A terrible time
which I fear we have not seen the end.
Michael



> Why Kent State is important today
> By Michael Corcoran  |  May 4, 2006  |  The Boston Globe
> THIRTY-SIX years ago today, Ohio National Guardsmen shot 13 college students
> at Kent State University who were protesting US incursions into Cambodia as
> part of the Vietnam War. Nine victims survived, including one who is confined
> to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Four students -- Jeffrey Miller,
> Allison Krause, Bill Schroeder, and Sandy Scheuer -- were killed.
> The students were unarmed, and the closest was more than 60 feet away from the
> Guard at the time of the shooting. There was no warning shot; the National
> Guard never issued an apology; and no one ever spent a day in jail for the
> killings despite the fact that the President's Commission on Campus Unrest,
> appointed by President Nixon in 1970, found the shootings to be ''unwarranted
> and inexcusable."
> Yearly, since the tragedy, Kent State students, alumni, and others have met on
> the anniversary of the shooting to reflect and remember. Alan Canfora, who was
> shot by the Guard, says, ''The students today act as the conscience of the
> college, and the country . . . just like the students did in 1970."
> This year's memorial will come, as the last three have, in the midst of a war
> that has become increasingly divisive. While the memory of Kent State and
> other violent clashes from that time between protesters and authorities did
> not deter the incumbent president from leading the country into another
> unpopular war, it is important to honor Kent State's spirit of dissent and
> what it taught about the bloody consequences of intense division.
> Halfway across the country, the lessons of Kent State are taught each semester
> in debate classes at Emerson College. J. Gregory Payne, associate professor of
> organizational and political communication and a Kent State historian, has
> been teaching students about history, advocacy, and rhetoric through the lens
> of Kent State for decades.
> According to Payne, remembering this tragedy is important because ''Kent State
> is not about the past -- it's about the future."
> Consider the similarities: In 1970, just as today, we had an unpopular
> president carrying out an unpopular war for questionable reasons.
> Richard Nixon and George W. Bush embody many of the same divisive
> characteristics. Bush tells the world: ''You are with us or you are with the
> terrorists." Nixon's public statement after the shootings blamed the students:
> ''When dissent turns to violence it invites tragedy."
> Again our civil liberties are being threatened. Bush has ordered the
> wiretapping of US citizens without a warrant and holds detainees indefinitely
> without trial; Nixon was spying on student activists and what he called
> ''domestic radicals."
> But, perhaps the most telling comparison is the sharp division within the
> nation, both then and now. Americans are now, as we were then, split to the
> core on matters of war and peace, life and death, and cultural values. The
> President's Commission concluded it was ''the most divisive time in American
> history since the civil war." Bill Schroeder's parents received signed letters
> after the shooting saying, among other things, that their ''riot-making,
> communist son" deserved to die.
> Today antiwar protesters are unfairly discredited by the administration as
> they were in 1970. When Cindy Sheehan took antiwar positions after her
> 24-year-old son, Casey Sheehan, died in Iraq, she was smeared by pundits like
> Bill O'Reilly, who said she was a pawn of ''far-left elements that are using
> her" and that Sheehan was ''dumb" enough to let them do it.
> Of course, the absence of a draft now and its presence then may explain why
> the antiwar movement during the Vietnam War had a greater intensity then it
> does now. Still, as the protests in New York City last week indicate, the
> longer the war in Iraq drags on, the more vehement the opposition seems to
> get.
> Musicians, once again, are singing songs of dissent. Last Friday Neil Young,
> who in 1970 wrote ''Ohio" in reaction to the shootings, began streaming a new
> antiwar album ''Living with War" for free on his website. Days later, Pearl
> Jam also released an album made up entirely of protest music.
> My generation can't ignore the lessons of Kent State. The same mindset and
> failure in leadership that led National Guardsmen to fire at students of the
> same age and from the same Ohio hometowns is similar to what led US soldiers
> to torture detainees in Iraq.
> Kent State should remind us of what happens when a grossly misguided war
> divides a country. If we can speak candidly and openly about our history and
> our present -- even the worst elements of it -- then we can ensure that the
> lives lost on May 4, 1970, were not in vain.
> Michael Corcoran is a journalism major at Emerson College.
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