Forty Years Ago Today

Today is the 40th anniversary of the Kent State massacre in which four unarmed students were shot and killed by Ohio National Guardsmen and another nine were wounded. The students were protesting Nixon's illegal and immoral bombing of Cambodia and had set fire to an ROTC building. The students were told to disperse and were inundated with tear gas. Then the soldiers opened fire. As a witness says 40years later, it's still an unsolved murder.

I remember being at Kent State only a short time after the shootings. My mother, oblivious to the hundred thousand activists who were heading to Washington, D.C., for protest marches, decided to go ahead with a trip to the capital that she had planned for my brother's and my spring break. As we drove from Wisconsin to Washington, we encountered young people and hippies at every truck stop. When we got to the capital, it had been virtually shut down, as the activists had taken over the entire Mall.

We did not get to visit the Washington Memorial or many of the sites around D.C., but my brother and I received a valuable lesson in history, as we saw so many people spontaneously petitioning their government to end the violence overseas, as this violence had so dramatically spilled over into violence against our own people here at home.

On the way back to Wisconsin, my mother detoured to Kent State. It was a chilling experience to be on the campus where students had died just a few days before.

Despite the public outrage regarding Kent State, the violence did not end there. Just 10 days later, at Jackson State University in Jackson, Miss., another two unarmed student protesters were murdered, this time by local law enforcement.

Let us never forget Kent State. In 1989, when Chinese troops opened fire on protesting students in Beijing's Tianamen Square, Americans were justifiably outraged and simultaneously awed by the courage of a lone student defying the tanks. But even at the time, I reminded those who would listen that our government would do the same under similar conditions and in fact it had at Kent State. Let us never forget what our government is capable of doing and very willing to do to silence protest.