Kent State

The recent coverage of the anniversary of the Kent State shootings has aroused a series of long-dormant feelings for me. When I heard the informative coverage on Public Radio (providing a lot of information that was new to me), I realized that I had not thought about those events for years. It is strange that this should be so, as the shootings affected me deeply and changed forever my political outlook.

I was a faculty member at the University of Hawaii at the time, teaching freshman English and politically independent but leaning more conservative. After that day, I joined those opposing the war, developed a mistrust of political leadership that survives to this day, turned away from the Republican/Conservative philosophy, and confirmed an absolute horror of what I call primary certitude, the ugly tendency to form opinions without benefit of facts and then inflict them on other people.

There had been protests against the war on the University of Hawaii campus, the major one involving the take-over of the university’s administration building, where I was to have my own office many years later. The sit-in was composed of a mixture of students and faculty who camped out on the second floor for several days. There were later removed and arrested, although the charges were dropped. We were so naïve, that a couple of young faculty members went down to bail out a colleague and found that bail could not be paid by a check. Cash only, please.

When the news came of the shootings at Kent State, I was horrified and remember saying, “My God, they’re killing their children.” I was thinking of the older generation who were supporting the war and all the politicians who called those protesting the war unpatriotic, communist, criminals, and worse. These were the people who, upon hearing that the national guard had opened fire on unarmed students, said too bad they didn’t shoot them all. The world split into a generational divide at that moment: there were people out there whose hatred of those who didn’t agree with them could erupt at any moment into violence. That day, the world became less safe, and comfortable assurances about tolerance and community evaporated with the smoke of the rifles turned on the students, all the more tragic since one of those killed was an ROTC student just walking to class and not even part of the protest. That could have been me.

These days, these same people of primary certitude have found new targets: illegal immigrants, homosexuals, poor people, abortions. The hate and passion directed to the long-haired hippies that erupted that day into killing has not gone away. It has merely found other outlets and leaves me wondering why the US needs scapegoats. Is it a driving need for conformity in a country that claims to be tolerant? Is it an unconscious need for authority? Is it the self-righteousness of certain religious sects? Is it the reinforced ignorance of narrow education that despises anything different? All I know is that historically, this country has tended to express differences in raw language designed to incite and vilify.

I have the same concern now that I did when I heard of the shootings. Unless we can learn from what Kent State has to teach us, we will be doomed by our own hate speech and Kent States can happen again.