Tomorrow, May 4, marks 40 years since the tragic shooting of students at Kent State University in Ohio by the National Guard, leading to the death of four students and the wounding of nine others!
Kent State became the symbol of a divided America over the Vietnam War’s continuation, and expansion into Cambodia by the Nixon Administration. The reaction was for the President, Vice President Spiro Agnew, and Ohio Governor James Rhodes (who called for the National Guard to be sent to the college campus) to condemn the students as causing their own tragedy, and the country was as divided for the next few years on that terrible event and Vietnam as ever before or since the Civil War in the mid 19th century!
Kent State radicalized many, but also confirmed many conservatives in their own self righteousness and patriotism, backing a war that had a lack of support among a large portion of the American population!
The thought that the National Guard was out of control, and took the action to shoot down and kill college students in cold blood, and that many did not see that as a horrible event, is still enough to make one sick to his stomach forty years later!
The problem is that the hate that has developed in the midst of economic crisis now in America reminds one too much of those tumultuous times! Hate speech and heated rhetoric is now employed over domestic affairs, and leadership is demonized as then, and in many ways, the divisions in America today are reminiscent of those days!
It is the old battle of the movement for progress and change, against the forces of tradition and retrenchment! Vietnam was the controversy of that time, while now it is domestic reform after years of stagnation, corruption, and economic exploitation!