May 4, 1970 and and I was thinking it' s just another miserable day counting the clock until my release from the prison adults call high school. Funny thing on this particular day, the government shot at a large crowd of anti-war students at a college campus in Ohio killing four young people in the 13 seconds of rifle fire. Even in the neolithic period before the Internet, and the 24/7 news crawls underneath the talking heads, the news traveled with a viral speed across the nation and world.
Protests emerged on most of the campuses throughout the nation during those spring days still protesting the US invasion of Cambodia and now the deaths of four college students. As the protests swelled nationwide, a bad night in Jackson Mississippi on May 14 took a real ugly turn by the early morning hours of May 15, 1970.
There were rumors that the Fayette Mayor and his wife had been shot, and a protest of about 100 students turned into a riot when fires were set and a dump truck was overturned on the Jackson State campus. Seventy-five heavily armed policemen and Mississippi State police offers came to quell the uprising. A broken bottle, a rock or brick thrown, an officer buckling -nobody really knows for sure what lit the fuse- but rapid fire commenced on the crowd in front of a Jackson State University girls dorm building and did not stop until a full 30 seconds had elapsed. Miraculously, only two young people died from the gunfire with twelve students being wounded. Every window on the street side view of the five story dormitory where the confrontation was resolved was shattered by police gunfire. The building took more than 460 bullets, and many of those are still very visible today.
Young and old alike who were on the fence chose sides on May 4, 1970 and in the weeks that followed. There was no longer any middle ground left on the issues of Viet Nam and American politics. You either marched into the hippie-peace-antiwar-treehugger-freak camp or you chose the conservative-religious-guns-nationalism outpost to stake your future in.
As summer drew near in the month following the Kent State and Jackson State riots, President Nixon created the Commission on Campus Unrest. Thirteen hearings would be held and nothing of consequence would be gained. No one was found guilty of doing anything wrong. No one was fired for stupidity. Zip. By the time the commission convened to do its nothingness, summer break had all ready taken most of the gas out of the angry protests. When schools reconvened in the fall there was simply another new great divide that had formed silently in the nation, but the big era of protest had literally been shot down.
After forty years people from both sides are no closer to finding any common ground. The context of the word games people play to score current political points have changed but the divide created after Kent State-Jackson State massacres has only grown over the years. This divide has widened because the national paranoia has has exploded over the last forty years. The killings that occurred over those eleven days in May opened a giant gash where fear crept into the soul of the nation.
This dread of a US government in total control and without a sense of either fairness or justice has remained with the American consciousness in varying degrees since the May days of 1970. For a few interludes, like after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the brief bubble-worlds of dot.com and real estate, the malady waned, but then suddenly reappeared more virulent and dangerous than before. It has become a cancer in the patient, and the patient is us. The absurdity of our situation is that although the extremes of both the left and right both share an equal fear of the omnipotent government the great divide prevents real dialog from curing the patient.
So we find ourselves forty years later on this day listening to a couple of songs by two major pop music artists like Neil Young and Steve Miller to hear what all that anger was about. Or maybe you can hear in many of The Pretenders songs the voice of a young female student on the campus at the time filled with a bitterness and resolve. Or put on that Joe Walsh classic Turn to Stone and hear what he was thinking being a former student.
The songs have stood the test of time, too bad the fear has as well.
Try peace this century.
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