A high-school friend writes to ask what I remember of May 4, 1970. We would graduate in a month and go to university in the fall. The fear and excitement of that symbolic step toward adulthood was blunted by the killing of four students by Ohio National Guardsmen at Kent State University. On April 30, President Nixon announced that U.S. and South Vietnamese troops had invaded Cambodia the previous day, pursuing the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops based there. Protests erupted across the country. We lived some fifty miles from Kent and learned of the killings while still in school. I remember brooding on it while walking home. Some of the more fashionably radical students were already talking about shutting down the school – always a popular notion among students.
The violent deaths of
people not much older than me seemed a rude entrée to impending adulthood. If I
had to characterize my emotional state that day, I would describe a new
awareness of vulnerability, that I too would die some day – just not so soon, I
hoped. I felt no political impulses, no sense of moral outrage. I took it more
personally. I was seventeen and still profoundly naïve.
I would work that summer,
read, save money, then go away to another big state university. I was the first
person in my family to do so, and it would be the first time I would live away
from home. In my discrete calendar, May signals beginnings and conclusions. My
father entered the world and departed it in May. Today I mourn those
four young people and the 58,000 Americans who died in
Vietnam. In his Rambler essay of June 1, 1751, Dr. Johnson writes:
“To be always afraid of
losing life is, indeed, scarcely to enjoy a life that can deserve the care of
preservation. He that once indulges idle fears will never be at rest. Our
present state admits only of a kind of negative security; we must conclude ourselves
safe when we see no danger, or none inadequate to our powers of opposition.
Death, indeed, continually hovers about us, but hovers commonly unseen, unless
we sharpen our sight by useless curiosity.”
1 comment:
I came home from Cleveland Heights High School and heard the radio on. My mother called out, "They're shooting students down at Kent State." I listened to the news for a minute and was felt a stab of fear that the revolution was starting without me. "Mom, I'm going to take your car," I said. "Where are you going?" "Down to Kent." "You can't, they say the police are blocking the roads into town." So I walked down to the closer university campus, Case Western Reserve, where there was a full riot underway. We blocked Euclid Avenue just down from Severance Hall. Twenty mounted policemen formed up at the nearest intersection. "Hold your ground!" shouted the leaderly among us, as the mounted policemen raised their batons and charged. The hoofbeats got louder, the horses came faster, and we took off at the last second before the hooves and batons came down on our heads. I was very disappointed in the mounted police, who went on a window-breaking rampage across the campus. But that's how I become one of the few modern people to experience a cavalry charge by a real enemy who intended me harm. Scary and thrilling. I have no sympathy for ideologies of modern protestors, but I can see why young people take to the streets.
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