So, seems in my contract I'm supposed to do one of these Anniversary things every spring.  Last year we had the Kurt Cobain's Been Dead for Ten Years thing.  Now we're moving a little farther back...into the groovy seventies!  May 4^th either means something to you or it doesn't.  Yes, it's Cinco de Mayo Eve, but for many people, either because they are historically conscious or live in the northeast corner of Ohio, it's also a day of solemn remembering for a tragedy that happened thirty-five years ago on the campus of my alma mater, Kent State University.

Well, it used to be anyway.  Now it's a day that's been stolen and fenced, part and parcel, to any socialist, liberal, neo-hippie, anti-establishment, pro-environment, maniac Democrat, communist, pinko, gay and/or lesbian group with a persuasive enough shriek.  But more on that in a moment, first, let's do-oo-o the ti-i-ime warp agaiiiiin!

The townspeople, good, God-fearing folk, were shocked, titillated, and downright skeered that next time the marijuana-mad longhairs they read about in the paper might go so far as to encroach upon their property, knock down their front doors, and steal their children at knifepoint in order to brainwash them against Mr. President.  Rumors spread and the mayor called upon the governor for help.  The governor promised to send in some reinforcements. 

The next day, Saturday, many students helped to clean up the downtown area, sweeping up glass and trying to reassure the townspeople that they weren't all drunken communist maniacs.  At the same time, though, another contingent of activists, some say galvanized by radical out-of-towners who knew a good opportunity when they saw it, started up another protest near the Army ROTC building on campus, which was, for them, a symbol of the burgeoning military-industrial complex that was claiming too many young men with frivolous wars.  In the early evening, the protesters cleared the building out and started to destroy it, throwing bricks through the windows and then, after a few unsuccessful attempts, finally succeeded in setting the building on fire.  Some people even went so far as to interfere with the fire department when they arrived. 

Now the townspeople's fear was justified, but the governor, who arrived on Sunday to survey the scene for himself, decided to keep the university open, thinking that the worst had passed.  The National Guard had set up patrols, and all the chaotic energy had seemed to subside.  Unfortunately, many students saw the presence of the National Guard as either an insult or a challenge, and another anti-war demonstration was organized, word-of-mouth, for the afternoon.  Somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 students assembled again in the large, grassy field of the Commons, and their chanting incited the National Guard, made up of mostly young soldiers who weren't quite fit for duty in Vietnam or others who were past their prime, to try to intervene.  The guardsmen gave the order to disperse, fearing another riot, and the protesters, fearing an infringement of their right to assemble, responded with more indignant chants and insults.  Some protesters threw stones at the guardsmen, which prompted them to release canisters of tear gas around the crowd.  Nature intervened, however, and the winds blew the tear gas away from the protesters.  With their options limited, the guardsmen, being ordered to enforce the Ohio Riot Act, raised their bayonets and marched towards the crowd.  The crowd moved back, and some people, sensing the very real danger that things could get out of control, decided to leave.  Then a very strange thing happened.  The guardsmen turned their backs on the angry crowd, marched up the gentle slope of the hill towards Taylor Hall, and then turned and fired. 

Sixty to seventy shots.  Automatic rifles.  Americans shooting Americans, which, hey, is nothing new, but this wasn't a gunfight in the back alleys of Chicago.  This wasn't the Draft Riots of the 1860s where an entire city was burning and the riots needed to be quelled.  This was a tool of the government enforcing its will, right or wrong, on an opposing group of equally free people seeking life, liberty and happiness.  Two sides of one coin, only one group had guns and the other had words.  Hard to say which is more dangerous.

This could've been covered up.  It sounds unbelievable, but the American public at large would've liked to have believed anything else than that a group of soldiers unmercifully unloaded on a group of kids.  The red states were even redder than they are now, and the stories that appeared in print the next day could've been worded to describe the horrible action as a thing of necessity.  But there were a few facts that were hard to erase.  First of all, of the four students killed, only one—and this is a maybe—was part of the anti-war demonstration.  The others were regular students walking around campus.  Clean-cut kids with swimming scholarships and nice girlfriends.  They pulled bullets out of the walls of Tri-Towers, a dorm complex at least a couple hundred yards away.  The guardsmen weren't really aiming, and as a result, well, are you familiar with the term ‘friendly fire'? 

Second, nobody—nobody—knew exactly what happened.  The guardsmen wouldn't fess up, and nobody would admit to firing first or even giving the order or why.  Thirty-five years have passed, and still, out of the primordial ooze of a thousand theories and possibilities, no real explanation has evolved.

Yes, time is working in reverse here.  People get forgetful or just regress all those horrible memories.  Those who were there in the crowd...well, they've got a reason to be angry, but with that anger comes a license to exaggerate and point erroneous fingers.  For some, the hatred has become total, a consuming motivation to keep on living and keep up the simultaneous bragging ("I was there!") and bitching ("I was there!").  There is history there in that spot, but there are no details. 

So, the country, the government, the university, the city, the students then and now are all left with the same question: What the hell are we going to do about this?

Well, if you're the university, you clam up.  What? A massacre? Here?  Ha-ha! Never happened.  By the way, we're changing the name of the school.  What? Yes.  Kent State University becomes Kent University.  They only changed it my freshman year back to KSU, but I think that may have been mostly due to the outdated logo.  For the first two decades, the school tried to disassociate themselves from the event by ignoring that it ever happened.  Kind of reflective of the whole Vietnam situation.  Attendance slumped, and the general scholastic vigor slowly waned until that semi-famous insult finally seemed apt: Kent Read, Kent Write, Kent State!  But then we get a new president, this old feisty woman with bold plans.  Let's stop running from this.  It's the nineties now, and we can use this to our advantage.  New memorials were built, new events were planned.  Embrace our history!  Let's learn from the mistakes that happened here, but since the Republicans are still in control of our funding, let's try not to point any fingers, okay?

So now they have the May 4^th Symposium every year, usually centering around a topic like "Non-violent Conflict Resolution" or "Healthy Dissension in Democracy," something like that, and lots of money is handed to lots of famous speakers who give lectures to sparsely-populated auditoriums.  I never knew one student who went to one.  But on the flipside, aha...let's give the radicals a little restitution.  A new student organization was formed, the May 4^th Task Force.  I know what you're thinking... "Task Force"? What do they do, covert infiltration?  Divide and conquer?  Black ops?  Originally, their purpose was to plan and execute a memorial event, something solemn and tasteful.  So every year they break out the candles and everyone sits around at night on May 3^rd and meditates.  It's really a pretty thing to see, all the candles lighting up faces across the now-vacant Blanket Hill where they buried the constitution. 

Of course, part of a vigil's essence is that it is silent and lonely, contemplative and pretty.  And for the task force, that's not really enough.  So, every year, the patchwork pants-clad, white-man-dreadlock-sprouting, drum-circling radicals recruit more and more members, and supplicate enough money from the Student Senate to put on some kind of rally on May 4^th.  And every year it has gotten more ridiculous as crackpots from around the country hear about this and in turn ask to be part of the event...for a nominal fee, of course. 

Let's have some folk bands, like those guys who were at Woodstock!  Let's pull Country Joe and his remaining Fish out of whatever backwater swamp he's living at!  Let's get that girl who lived in a Sequoia for a year!  Let's get some Indians, I mean real live, property-deprived Indians!  And let's get some of those guys who were arrested at that WTO demonstration!  Dude, you forgot the gays!

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the environment as much as the next guy, and I don't want it trampled.  I hate what happened to the Indians.  Globalization and unfair trade irk and scare me.  And the gays...well, let's just say I liked that part in Mulholland Falls.  But by picking out some of the most pissed-off, inarticulate, liberal assholes who are past their prime and still living their lives like Magical Mystery Tour just came out last week, they've essentially created a circus, where all the issues and their most controversial proponents can be paraded around like juggling bears.  There is no logic, no attempt at rational discourse, no goal of education.  And for this reason, no one goes to the rally except freshmen and every hippie in the area who scraped enough gas money to get there.  There is a choir, and it is being preached to.  It's a pep rally, a chance for people to see others of similar beliefs.  Some of these beliefs are valid, but most are not.  For one thing, what they all should have learned is that the style of protest that became so popular in the sixties turned out to be as effective as the style of warfare we tried to perpetrate in Korea and Vietnam.  The military learned from their mistakes—the hippies didn't.  

And, as a result, no one's memory has been preserved.  No one can remember the names of the students who were shot.  No one can remember what those who died had come to Kent for in the first place—a liberal education.  No one wants to give up the spirit of protest that caused the whole situation in the first place.

Am I saying lay down?  No.  Am I saying, let the Red States and their faith in the holy might of our armies keep on keeping on?  No.  But for God's sake, for history's sake, for Allison, Jeffery, Sandra, and William's sake, let's find something more effective.  Vietnam, for better or worse, is long gone, baby.  The US got out of Saigon; it's time for you to as well.

A mixed up myth turned touchstone is always dangerous.  No one knows what really happened, but lots of people like to think they do.  And while it keeps getting farther and farther away from our consciousness, I hope that the basic lessons will someday be clearer to the eye: it takes two to start a fight, and it takes only a second for something you thought you had control over to escape and draw blood.  Stop letting emotions guide your politics, and stop letting your politics guide your lifestyle.  Life is too precious to waste on ideas.  This is something that goes back to Cain and Abel or those monkeys in 2001, whichever you prefer, but somehow it never sinks in.  Ah, well.  You may say that I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.

For photographs of the day's events, click here. 

For more Kent State/Police State fun, click here!