by Matt Agorist, The Free Thought Project:
On May 4, 1970, a disorganized and nonviolent antiwar protest turned violent and deadly when the Ohio National Guard inexplicably opened fire on students at Kent State University — indelibly polarizing the United States populace to an extreme arguably unabated since.
Guardsmen opened fire on the assembled crowd, unleashing between 61 and 67 bullets in 13 seconds — which left four people dead and nine wounded. Now, 49 years after the unjustified bloodbath, critical questions remain unanswered about both details of the incident, as well as circumstances that culminated in the shooting of unarmed protesters.
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Perhaps the only inarguable detail of the Kent State massacre, often referred to simply as “Kent State,” is the fundamental, polarizing shift in popular perception.
The younger generation epiphanically concluded that the constitutional right to speak against a government amounted to a hollow promise — and that same government harbored no qualms in deploying violence to quash such dissent. But that same generation of young people, generally under 30 years old, also witnessed their parents’ and the older generation’s acceptance of — and, often, prideful approval of — that exact violence by the National Guard.
Inaccurate propaganda worked brilliantly to the government’s advantage — both before and after the shootings — cleaving false divisions between the ‘dirty hippies’ and ‘ordinary’ Americans. Families of the dead and wounded received abhorrently telling letters in the weeks following.
Among the dead was an ROTC student-athlete who — evidencing the randomness of the shooting — had nothing to do with protests and happened to be caught at the wrong place at the wrong time. His parents received a letter, cited by The Bulletin, calling their son a “destructive, riot-making communist” — and they should “be thankful he is gone.”
Soldiers at Quantico Marine Base, the Bulletin reported, erupted in cheers when someone wrote, “Kent State 0, National Guard 4” on a chalkboard.
Shocking as those reactions to the killing of unarmed, peaceful protesters might be 46 years removed from that day, elements of division in the U.S. populace residually still affect the political climate.
As many activists observe, society-at-large tends to scoff at activity on which the roots of so-called American democracy was founded — dissent against the unjust — particularly when the injustice is effected by the government. It’s likely such misunderstanding and mischaracterization of what makes for a healthy, democratically-modeled system began in earnest in the turbulent 1960s, solidified with the Kent State massacre, and emphatically continues today.
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