TRYING TO MAKE SENSE OF THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE KENT STATE SHOOTINGS

BUT AS MAY 4 HAS ARRIVED, I CANNOT

I have wanted to be a writer since as young as I can remember.

I wasn’t motivated by the news of May 4^th at Kent (as I was only 5.5 at the time), but Kent is where I went to journalism school.

My parents, who were endlessly irked when anything suggested the innocent shot and killed “didn’t get what was coming to them,” were not thrilled when I announced to them as my freshman year of high school was wrapping up in May 1980 that I wanted to go to Kent.

I guess they had largely given up resisting when I went off to Kent in fall 1983. To me, the shootings were long ago – but looking back, they we’re really.

Back then, the J-School was in Taylor Hall. The college newspaper was headquartered where the May 4 Visitors Center now reflects on events with dignity. 

My wife-to-be’s dorm window looked out on the Prentice Hall parking lot where vigils were held for the four dead.

I couldn’t help but confront what it meant when a right-wing governor decided a military operation was needed to crush the very dissent protected in the Constitution supposedly beloved by “God and Country” people like him.

I remember a ton of my colleagues at the Daily Kent Stater – many now superstars in the field of journalism and related pursuits – vowing to move out of the state if evil Jim Rhodes ever became governor again.

I also remember dozens of us talking about coming back for the 25^th and certainly the 50^th anniversary of the events (as the 15^th that we witnessed was important, but not exactly a huge milestone.)

I recall Kent’s administration struggling to deal with a proper memorial. 

A contest to design one was fumbled, declawed and screwed up just about every way timid leaders -- at a learning institution afraid to learn from its own past history – could think of.

I openly wept when I returned not that long ago, to find that the old Stater office was now the appropriate, comprehensive and dignified visitor’s center that the Kent State community had been yearning for, for more than four decades.

My wife had the same reaction when we returned to our native NE Ohio a few years later so she could see the displays.

I certainly was no campus radical. Not even close. I waned a job, at a large newspaper. My course load, night job and daytime work for the Stater dominated such ambitions.

But I’ve always been a progressive. 

Rooting for the little guy and railing against the privileged one percent (before we labeled it as such).

I always hoped May 4^th would inspire compassion, decency, fair play and above all, a lifelong commitment to non-violent approaches/solutions to even our most visceral and explosive problems.

But as I write this – empathy, kindness and the very notion that we live under a democracy are under siege by a mad king president who acts much more like a dictator than a statesman proud to be serving the same office as Lincoln and Roosevelt.

That evil being’s cabinet is hell-bent on destroying education for all, access to healthcare and any semblance of a safety net for those who need it the most.

When I wonder how this POTUS would have reacted to Kent State, I only have to think of Charlottesville. 

A vicious and violent Ohioan, doubtlessly emboldened by a white supremacist president, took the life of an innocent.

The great #45’s weak effort to unify the nation he takes joy in dividing – praising neo-Nazis and worse.

I want to be hopeful. I want to think that, even though Coronavirus has turned on-campus observances (star-studded and other) into online activities, people can learn from Kent State.

I want to think that bullying, might and power are not the end game…to commerce, the body politic or a life lived well.

But with a GOP owned by the gun lobby and the supposed leader of the free world goading people to take the law into their own hands while defying pandemic measures designed to save precious lives, I am struggling.

https://www.kent.edu/may4kentstate50