The Fourth be with you. The fourth. Star Wars. Fourth of July. Four. Four dead in O-HI-O..
Today I watched, on CSPAN, as craven congressmen, in the House of Representatives, voted to kill a health care act I was never excited about. They did it without reading the text, without waiting for the report of their own Congressional Budget Office, without knowing how much it will cost and without knowing who it will affect.
As I scroll through Facebook, throughout the day, I see my lifelong friend, Dirk Keller, posting articles, links and songs about the Kent State killings. It was 47 years ago today. He expresses his outrage every year. Good. We need to be reminded, constantly, that our own government would order our killings and that uniformed police and soldiers would willingly carry them out.
I was in the 8th grade, in 1970. I lived down the street from MacMurray College, in sleepy Jacksonville, Illinois. Back then, MacMurray was a small but thriving little religiously affiliated liberal arts college. It's students were probably affluent and many came from out of state. It was common to see license plates from Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York and other northeastern states. By the late 1960s, their hair grew longer and some were staging small protests against the Vietnam War. Oddly, I felt no affinity for those I saw with hair curling down their necks or those carrying protest signs. That seemed foreign to me. While I idolized the Beatles, I also liked my Sgt. Rock comic books.
It was a confusing world. I was checking books by Eldridge Cleaver out of the library, buying the Walker Report on the Chicago police riot (what 13 year old reads a government report?) and checking biographies out of the library on Lenin, Stalin, Tito and Che. And then I would go home and watch reruns of Combat on TV. I watched Patton, in the theater, and loved it (I still do).
One sunny day, the first week of May, I came home and started to walk into the living room where my dad was watching the nightly news. I stopped in the doorway between the dining room and the living room as I started to realize what they were saying and showing. National Guard troops, at Kent State University in Ohio, had fired on students armed with nothing more than rocks bottles and tear gas canisters (which they were returning to sender). Some were actually running away as the soldiers, whose faces were concealed by gas masks, fired on them. I was stunned. I had a Eureka! moment. Those students down the street at MacMurray weren't much older than me. They were the ones I had most in common with, not the politicians or police. If they would shoot those kids in Ohio, they would shoot people like me! In that instant, I knew which side I was on. For life.
As the days went on, students went on strike throughout the country and many universities were closed down for the year. Some were occupied by their own states' National Guard troops. One of those schools was Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. Many years later, I would move to Carbondale, and attend SIU. In those days (late '70s), one would still see flyers stapled to telephone polls with the message, "Remember Kent State". Thanks to people like my friend Dirk, who keep the flame alive, we pause briefly each year to remember the fallen at Kent State and at Jackson State.
Yes, Jackson State. Because while the media focus was always on what happened in Ohio, those four weren't the only students killed that week. Students were killed in Mississippi as well. And that brings us to the present, because the reason we didn't hear as much about Jackson State, nor remember it today, is because those students were black. No one was punished for the Kent or Jackson killings. No one is convicted for the murders of unarmed young black men, by those wearing the uniform of the state today. We hear apologists for the police asking why the hashtag for the movement is #BlackLivesMatter. It's because they don't.
In the end, those controlling the levers of the state will kill all they deem necessary, to suppress dissent that threatens their wealth and power. They won't care what we look like. One of the most inspirational movements in recent times has been the Native American led protests at Standing Rock, in the Dakotas. They were peaceful. They were prayerful. And they were met with violence. They were attacked with dogs, threatened with guns and sprayed (in below freezing temperatures) with hoses. Politicians across several states have responded not with reflection on the object of the protest but to attempt to outlaw protest itself. Some have gone so far as to introduce legislation immunizing from prosecution anyone striking a protester with an automobile.
Clearly, in these charged times, the atmosphere exists where one spark could light one or many Kent States. Those of us who believe resistance, to unconstitutional and militaristic acts by our government and environmental degradation by polluting corporations, is our moral duty must recognize that we may suffer casualties. We may be the casualties. But, we must.... persist.
The fourth be with you.
