40 years ago today

I lived in Akron for a while during the 90s on summers away from Ball State. I worked with a lot of KSU students/grads.

It was sad how blase they were about the incident. They treated it with disrespect, a kind of whiny, "Why is this the way our campus is defined? It happened (then) 25 years ago" kind of vibe.

 

That's interesting, Bubs, and kind of depressing.

It's true that Kent State was far from the only campus that saw protests -- there were huge protests in Madison, Berkeley, the East Coast, etc. But the tragedy of National Guardsmen shooting and killing protesters at Kent State was shocking, even for the "silent majority."

 

Like Spinited, I was around when this happened. It galvanzied almost every university across the country and moved a lot of people off the fence into the anti-war side.

Someone at the time said something like "You know the country is in deep trouble when we start shooting our children."

 

Reading that reminds me a lot of the coverage of 9/11. Utter chaos.

 

i almost 13, a month shy of my bar mitzah. i would not get a pre-mitzvah haircut and did not cut my hair again until was 16. there's a connection in there.

chilling to realize it's been 40 years. what an unreal time.

 

I wonder if any of the shooters are alive. The Nuremberg defense is likely a constant thought if so

 

Not quite sure, novelist, how you equate a terrorist attack on this country with the National Guard murdering student demonstrators who posed no physical threat to them.

 

The girl in the photograph, with the photog.

 

her name? would read a piece on her.

 

That's Neil for ya. It's how he's rolled for four decades

 

Her name is Mary Ann Vecchio. She was not a student at Kent State but a 14-year-old runaway from Opa-Locka, Fla.
She's part of this piece in USA Today:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-05-03-kent-state_N.htm


And the story I heard David Crosby tell was Young came to his house the night of the massacre, then Stills showed up and within half-an-hour they had written "Ohio."

 

I think he meant the coverage, not the incident itself. The Akron story linked -- talk about your first draft of history. It has a reference to a possible sniper setting things off, which endured as a myth for years.