4 students murdered by US forces on a university campus in Ohio. 40th anniversar

[give her dixie]

Today marks the 40th anniversary of the murder of 4 students at Kent State University in Ohio.
US forces shot 67 rounds in 13 seconds, killing 2 peaceful demonstrators, and 2 students walking nearby.
The protests were against Nixons plans to invade Cambodia.
Listen to the following song worte a week after the murders by Neil Young.  Ohio.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qs6aaaJBAv0&feature=related

The stunning news 40 years ago today erupted in an era when current events carried a more potent ability to shock: "Four dead in Ohio," as musician Neil Young would quickly write.

A tired and scared unit of militiamen had shot 13 students at Kent State University, 40 miles from my home in Northeast Ohio. Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer and William Schroeder died in the fusillade that warm spring day in 1970.

It hit close to home - real close. It cut right through whatever emotional walls I'd built from years of hearing about assassinations, civil rights unrest and deaths in a foreign war.

These shootings happened in a familiar place, not a rice paddy halfway across the world. And despite being a bit desensitized by the violence of a restless decade, I felt shock that my government - the power we granted to the United States of America - could so quickly and callously gun down its own citizens.

The college administration ordered the campus closed. The government declared martial law. People in the sleepy little college town not far from Cleveland sat on their front porches with shotguns in their laps, waiting for hemp-crazed students and "outside agitators" to storm their neighborhood.

The shootings came two days after a protest against President Nixon's decision to invade Cambodia escalated into a student riot on one of the first warm Saturday nights of the year. Protesters burned the ROTC building - a house-sized World War II barracks sheathed in horizontal wooden siding painted a bland banana yellow.

Forty years later, the government's response reads like a Marx Brothers script. Rival police agencies working at cross-purposes. A university president who didn't let the unrest deter him from leaving that weekend for a family trip to Iowa. University administrators' efforts to have Ohio State Highway Patrol troopers sent to campus overruled when Kent Mayor Leroy Satrom convinced Gov. Jim Rhodes to dispatch a bunch of National Guard troops instead. The patrol's jurisdiction ended at the edge of campus, but the guard had authority both downtown and on campus.

Suddenly, it seemed like a war was breaking out just down the road from my home. My high school English teacher, who'd recently graduated from the Kent State education college, threw out his lesson plan the next day. Students and teacher shared ideas and talked politics. I'm sure I told them I worried about my boyhood friend, who then lived a block from campus.

Within a couple of years, I found myself carrying boxes of clothes and records into Apple Hall, a brown brick dormitory on the eastern fringe of the Kent State campus. Soon I was attending journalism classes in Taylor Hall, where the guardsmen turned and fired. A metal sculpture outside still carried a neatly circular bullet hole from that afternoon.

And as those years of education accumulated, I began to learn a bit about "my government" and its treatment of citizens. It wasn't always the British Redcoats killing five civilians outside the Boston Custom House in 1770 or al-Qaida terrorists in the airports on a dark and equally shocking September day in 2001. It could just as easily be police battling protesters in Chicago's Haymarket Square in 1886, or the Pinkertons trading gunshots with strikers six years later in Homestead, Pa., or any number of instances as black people across the country struggled for equal rights in the 1960s.

Now, 40 years afterward, I felt compelled to return to Blanket Hill, the quiet hilltop where students once made out, infamous now as the place where the guardsmen opened fire. I wanted to be there today, to march silently around the campus where I graduated and pay my respects to those kids who died needlessly in a nondescript parking lot outside an ordinary classroom building on the campus of a middling Midwestern university.

Time has dulled the shock I felt then, but hasn't softened the political beliefs that the shooting helped to crystallize. I learned that day, and in more days to come, that "my government," though not evil in itself, can best succeed in its function of ensuring domestic tranquility when an alert and clearheaded citizenry keeps a close watch on its actions. All of its actions. Especially the actions it tells us are justified by the times in which we live. And now, as a member of the Fourth Estate, I've made a career of watching - and alerting others when necessary.

I think author Edward Abbey summed it up best, in writing about Henry David Thoreau and the bumper sticker slogan, "Question Authority." Thoreau, Abbey wrote, would have agreed but amended it to "Always Question Authority." To which Abbey said he would add "All," as in "Always Question All Authority."

• Roger Nielsen is metro editor at the Athens Banner-Herald. He received his journalism degree from Kent State University in the summer of 1976.

[Gabriel_Hurl]

bit of a misleading thread title

[give her dixie]

How is it misleading?

[Gabriel_Hurl]

well when I first saw it I automatically it happened today - not forty years ago

[Denn Forever]

+1.
Misleading in that it may read as if it just happened.

I think everyone knows the the Vietnam war was a nasty chapter in US history.

[give her dixie]

Folks, the title is not misleading.
If I had of put "Anniversary of 4 students killed 40 years ago today" in the title,
how many people would have clicked on the link?

Interesting that people want to comment on the title, and not the subject.

[The Real Laoislad]

bit of a misleading thread title

agreed

[Ulick]

You must be taking lessons from the New York Times, Dixie 

[Dougal]

Folks, the title is not misleading.
If I had of put "Anniversary of 4 students killed 40 years ago today" in the title,
how many people would have clicked on the link?

Interesting that people want to comment on the title, and not the subject.

so you used a miss leading title,so your thread would get more views?

[mannix]

militia men? something like the minutemen of today if i am not mistaken. Cross them and you will be left to rot under the sun in new mexico or arizona if you are mexican, they are "protecting" their homeland and some do it without pay. Real heroes.

[muppet]

If you use a stunt to draw balanced opinion to your cause, most of them will just see the stunt not the cause.

I agree with the above, change the title.

[give her dixie]

I didn't add the title as a stunt, or to mislead people.

The fact that the title has become the talking point is mis leading.

10 replies to this article, and they all deal with the title.

Anyone have anything to say about the anniversary?

[stew]

How is it misleading?

Eh if you dont know that you are slow.

[stew]

Folks, the title is not misleading.
If I had of put "Anniversary of 4 students killed 40 years ago today" in the title,
how many people would have clicked on the link?

Interesting that people want to comment on the title, and not the subject.

so you used a miss leading title,so your thread would get more views?

Thats exactly what he did, sad really. 

[seafoid]

This is from the progressive magazine, by the mother of one of the people who was murdered.

I lost my son 40 years ago at Kent State

By Elaine Holstein, May 4, 2010

Today, May 4, marks 40 years since my son, Jeff, was shot and killed on the campus of his college. He and three of his classmates were murdered by the National Guard at an anti-war protest at Kent State. During a 13-second fusillade of rifle fire not only were Jeff, Allison Krause, Sandy Scheuer and Bill Schroeder killed but nine more of their Kent State fellow students were also wounded.

The students who had gathered there that day — all unarmed — held a large range of opinions about the seemingly endless war in Vietnam. Some of them, including Jeff, objected intensely to the increasing escalation of a war that had begun when they were barely in their teens. In fact, Jeff had written a poem about the war entitled, "Where Does It End?" in February of 1966, shortly before he turned 16.  Others in t he crowd had mixed feelings. Some were just onlookers, such as you would find at any gathering. Some, like Sandy, were on their way to their next class. And so, May 4, 1970, became one of the blackest days in the history of our country. It was the day I not only lost my child but also lost my innocence. I could no longer take on faith what I had been taught all my life about my "constitutional rights," the rights that supposedly made our country different from so many others. The decade that followed was filled for me with grief, anger, disillusionment and lawsuits. At the end of our legal battles, we were pressured by the judge and by our lawyers into accepting a settlement in which the parents of the dead students discovered that their sons and daughters' lives were worth a mere $15,000 each. It was never about the money for me. I wanted an admission of culpability, and more than that, I wanted an assurance that no mother would ever again have to bury a child for simply exercising the freedom of speech.

But all we got was a watered down statement that better ways must be found, etc., etc. I also discovered what I perhaps should have known already: that so many of my compatriots did not feel as I did. They believed that the students who were killed or wounded got what they deserved and, as I heard far too often, the National Guard "should have killed more of them." And now it's 2010 — 40 years later — and those wounded students are well into middle age, almost senior citizens. But Jeff remains in my memory forever as that bright, funny, passionate 20 year old. I have spent these 40 years watching my son, Russ, Jeff's big brother, grow older. I've valued (perhaps more than I would have if Jeff had not died) the close, satisfying relationship we share.

I've had the great joy of seeing my grandchildren, Jeff (yes, another Jeff Miller) and Jamie evolve from cute little children into a couple of the most admirable adults I know. I've danced at both their weddings and have been made happy by their happiness. But, once in a while, I wonder about my son Jeff's future that had so needlessly been cut short. What would he have been like now at age 60? What sort of career would he have had? Would he have married? And what about those other grandchildren that my husband and I might have enjoyed?  Now, as I watch the news on TV each night, I deplore the increasing ugliness of politics, and I'm afraid. I know too well what can happen when hatred takes over. Please, let us lower the volume and be civil toward each other. For Jeff's sake. And for all of ours.

Elaine Holstein, a retired school secretary and social worker, lives in New York City with her husband, Arthur, and has, on occasion, written articles and spoken to students on the subject of the Kent State shootings. She can be reached at pmproj@progressive.org.