May 4, 2010: 40 years after Kent State massacre in Ohio
..National Guard troops fired on a large crowd of students who were demonstrating against Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia. Those killings in Ohio helped shape the attitudes, politics and history of my generation, and so it seems frankly strange that so little public notice is given to the anniversary of Kent State, or to its aftermath on American college campuses. Oh, once a year, the press drags out the photo of the young woman on her knees crying next to a dead student, but that’s pretty much it. We Americans aren’t exactly known for caring deeply about our own history, but regardless of our national amnesia, it’s a simple fact that May 1970 was a turbulent, chaotic time that scared hell out of the established order.
