POLITICS
Four Dead In O-Hi-O
Post-traumatic stress from 13 seconds in 1970
The problem with living as long as I have is that history often repeats itself. I will be in 71 in just a couple of weeks on May 3rd.
The latest news of campus protests haunts me. My thoughts go back to May 4, 1970, when, a day after my 17th birthday, the headlines screamed that four students, peacefully protesting on the grounds of Kent State University, had been gunned down and killed by soldiers from the Ohio State National Guard.
I can’t help but compare the actions of those students protesting the Vietnam War to the current protests on campuses from New York’s Columbia University to Yale, to Harvard, and yes, even to Kent State in Ohio.
On that fourth day of May 1970, some 300 protesters gathered there to find they were facing twenty-eight National Guard soldiers. For a still unknown reason, those men fired 67 rounds from their M-1 rifles into the crowd of protesters.
Four students: Allison Krause, age 19; Jeffrey Glenn Miller, age 20; Sandra Lee Scheuer, age 20; and Willian Knox Schroeder, age 19 were all killed.
It took just 13 seconds to snuff out these young lives.
