"Tell me, Father, did they aim?"
May. 4th, 2005 11:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poltr1It happened 35 years ago today, at a small state-run college in northeast Ohio.
Many colleges and universities had student-led protests against the US involvement in Vietnam. UC Berkeley had them. So did SUNY/Buffalo, where city police came on campus and used tear gas on the students protesting in/around the old Norton Union. But one school gained notoriety because protesting students were shot, wounded, and killed by National Guard troops that were called in by Governor Rhodes.
That school is Kent State University.
Obviously, I was too young to know at the time what was going on. Someplace called "Vietnam" was in the news on a daily basis. As years went on, I learned more about the conflict there -- that we went there in order to prevent the spread of communism from North Vietnam to South Vietnam, even though the Vietnamese people (and possibly their government as well) didn't want us there.
Our young American men were drafted in order to serve there. Some conscientious objectors enrolled in college, while some fled the country. College students, open to other points of view, began to speak out against this war and our country's involvement in what was essentially a foreign country's civil war.
But at Kent State, things got out of hand. Instead of peaceful protests, things got violent. The National Guard came in and instead of trying to control the mob, they began shooting.
The university administration has tried hard to put this incident behind them, even cover it up by trying to build an expansion to the gymnasium on the site where the shootings took place. But the students won that fight, and the expansion wasn't built (or it was built elsewhere.)
There is a student group at KSU called the May 4 Task Force. Their mission is to keep alive the memory of the students killed and wounded there, and to promote student activism. Their website (linked above) is a tremendous resource into the events leading up to, and of, that dark day in our history. [Updated 5/5/05 00:08 EDT] Or it can be, if they'd populate it with more data. A few of their pages are merely placeholders at this time.
I see many parallels between the Vietnam War and the current Iraq War. What scares me the most is that in this post-9/11 world, is that dissidence is becoming tantamount to treason.
Many colleges and universities had student-led protests against the US involvement in Vietnam. UC Berkeley had them. So did SUNY/Buffalo, where city police came on campus and used tear gas on the students protesting in/around the old Norton Union. But one school gained notoriety because protesting students were shot, wounded, and killed by National Guard troops that were called in by Governor Rhodes.
That school is Kent State University.
Obviously, I was too young to know at the time what was going on. Someplace called "Vietnam" was in the news on a daily basis. As years went on, I learned more about the conflict there -- that we went there in order to prevent the spread of communism from North Vietnam to South Vietnam, even though the Vietnamese people (and possibly their government as well) didn't want us there.
Our young American men were drafted in order to serve there. Some conscientious objectors enrolled in college, while some fled the country. College students, open to other points of view, began to speak out against this war and our country's involvement in what was essentially a foreign country's civil war.
But at Kent State, things got out of hand. Instead of peaceful protests, things got violent. The National Guard came in and instead of trying to control the mob, they began shooting.
The university administration has tried hard to put this incident behind them, even cover it up by trying to build an expansion to the gymnasium on the site where the shootings took place. But the students won that fight, and the expansion wasn't built (or it was built elsewhere.)
There is a student group at KSU called the May 4 Task Force. Their mission is to keep alive the memory of the students killed and wounded there, and to promote student activism. Their website (linked above) is a tremendous resource into the events leading up to, and of, that dark day in our history. [Updated 5/5/05 00:08 EDT] Or it can be, if they'd populate it with more data. A few of their pages are merely placeholders at this time.
I see many parallels between the Vietnam War and the current Iraq War. What scares me the most is that in this post-9/11 world, is that dissidence is becoming tantamount to treason.
