Kent State: shoulda been done long ago
Every year, RelapsedCatholic commemorates Kent State '70, aka "The Good School Shooting". We're a few days early, but what the heck. I'm cranky. Besides, they started it...
What happened was: a bunch of stupid hippies got themselves (not to mention some innocent bystanders) killed during an anti-war protest. We're supposed to feel sorry for them to this day -- like everything hippies did, however pathetic, the rest of us never hear the end of it. (Hmmm, what sort of flag was that, Alan?) And we never will, until the last hippie is strangled by the entrails of the last commie.
There are Kent State movies and books and even operas. We hear more about this handful of red diaper babies and their dupe friends than we do about the millions who were slaughtered after the hippies got their way and the US left Vietnam.
Just another example of the warped worldview that brought us serial divorce, rampant drug use, self-indulgent "spirituality," VD outbreaks, bad music, worse fashions and a headlice epidemic, to name just a few hippie innovations -- culminating in Charles Manson and Altamont.
That famous (retouched) Pulitzer Prize photo (of a teenage runaway who should have been home with her parents instead of wandering around where she had no business) doesn't tell the whole story.
Here's what the peaceful protesters got up to days before the shooting:
"On the evening of May 1, 1970, a day after Richard Nixon announced an American counter-attack into Cambodia, students rioted in the main street of town, broke windows, set fires, and damaged cars. On May 2, a crowd of about 800 assembled on campus, disrupted a dance in a university hall, smashed the windows of the ROTC building, and threw lighted railroad flares inside. The building burned to the ground. A professor who watched the arson later told the Scranton commission, which investigated the shooting and the events leading up to it, 'I have never in my 17 years of teaching seen a group of students as threatening, or as arrogant, or a bent on destruction.'
"When fireman arrived students threw rocks at them, slashed their hoses with machetes, took away hoses and turned them on the firefighters. The police finally stopped the riot with tear gas. The National Guard was called in by the governor on May 2 and student rioters pelted them with rocks, doused trees with gasoline, and set them afire. Students attempted to march into town on May 3 but were stopped by the National Guard, the Kent city police department, the Ohio highway patrol, and the county sheriff's department. The protesters shouted obscenities and threw rocks.
"From May 1 to May 4 there were, in addition, riots in the town's main street, looting, the intimidation of passing motorists, stoning of police, directions to local merchants to put antiwar posters in their windows or have their stores thrashed, and miscellaneous acts of arson."
Then on May 4:
"Guardsmen arrived and, probably unwisely, ordered the crowd to disperse. The order was predictably ignored. The Guard fired tear gas canisters into the crowd. The Guard, consisting of a hundred men surrounded by rioters shouting obscenities and chanting 'Kill, kill, kill,' were under a constant barrage of rocks, chunks of concrete and cinderblock, and canisters. Fifty-eight Guardsmen were injured by thrown objects. Several of them were knocked to the ground."
Baby boomers should consider themselves lucky there weren't more Kent States. Ordinary, hard working people were sick of hippies then, just like I'm sick of them now. As we'll see tomorrow when we celebrate "Hard Hat Riot Day."