More thoughts on Kent State, Michigan and COVID-19

I’ve been watching several documentaries and eyewitness accounts of the May 4, 1970, Kent State University shootings and a couple of facts stand out. (I guess we can call them facts when virtually everybody who was there seems to have observed the same thing.)

First, witnesses all agreed that the students were peaceably assembling to protest the U.S. incursion into Cambodia during the war in Vietnam, which prompted the governor of Ohio to call in the National Guard. None of the students was armed, but “a couple of students” were seen throwing small rocks at the Guardsmen. No one saw any soldiers hit by rocks, although admittedly that could have happened.  

In response, Guard troops tossed a few tear gas canisters in the general direction of the crowd, drove around in a Jeep warning students to disperse and marched around the campus for a while doing “some kind of maneuvers” before climbing a hill and heading toward the door, so to speak.

“We thought they were going back to where they came from,” one witness said, when suddenly the rear guard turned 135 degrees and started shooting at the unarmed students with live ammunition. In 13 seconds, four students were killed and nine others were wounded. That part has been well-documented over the last 50 years, and descriptions of the event are generally consistent.  

Second, I learned for the first time that immediately after the shootings, somebody cut the telephone lines, leaving the campus without means of communication and effectively imposing a media blackout on the Kent campus. The idea was to keep students and others from calling friends and family to report on what had happened, which would have allowed those eyewitness accounts to find their way into the news media before the government could spin them away. The goal, in my opinion and the opinion of others, was to enable the authorities – under the direction of Republican Governor James Rhodes – to craft their own narrative about the shootings so that blame could be cast upon the students themselves and not the National Guardsmen who fired into the crowd.

You can make of that what you will, but I find it ironic that 50 years later, under a Republican administration, our leaders are still manipulating the news media by writing their own narrative and bending the truth by labeling any story they don’t like as “fake news.” The difference is there’s so much more media today…and they’re so much better at it than they were in 1970.

There's another irony that keeps coming back to me since anti-lockdown protests started a couple of weeks ago and men with guns started storming a number of our state capitols.

At Kent State, the victims of the tragedy were unarmed protesters who were peaceably exercising their First Amendment rights to free speech and assembly. They didn’t threaten anybody’s life or health and for that, they were shot to death. Last week, in Michigan, the opposite occurred. An angry band of urban terrorists with assault rifles and other guns – also claiming First Amendment protection – stormed the capitol to protest a government directive to stay home during a killer pandemic. In this case, the protesters were the people with the guns, and their rally actually did threaten the lives and health of civilians who found themselves downwind of potentially infectious coronavirus spew.

Finally, while there are differences, there are also similarities between the two events. No one was ever held accountable for the shootings at Kent State, and no one was sanctioned or punished for the assault on the Michigan legislature. In my opinion, someone should have gone to jail in each of those incidents, and in both cases, I believe it should have been the people with the guns.