Kent State Spring revisited

Dick Kneip was an Elkton boy, too: he would have turned 80 this year. In 1970 he was in the legislature considering a run to be the state's first catholic governor.

To a fifteen going on sixteen year-old man-child struggling to understand America's incursion into SE Asia at the expenses of those lives just slightly more lived than his own, the Kent State Massacre was an outrageous act of martial law gone apocalyptic.

The anniversary of this national shame gives baby boomers pause to ponder the decision forty three years ago of an Ohio National Guard unit to turn and fire scores of .30 caliber rifle rounds into a loosely assembled group of Kent State University students armed with rocks.

This single event branded Richard Nixon and his operatives criminals and galvanized many millions against whatever was to come from Washington DC henceforth; yet, a majority of voters was convinced by CREEP that Senator McGovern's first 1972 running mate was mentally ill.

At least 65,000 North Vietnamese civilians were killed, mostly in American air raids. South Vietnamese civilian deaths might have reached two million, wounded civilians five million; the country’s population had been 19 million. About a third of the wounded were women. A quarter were children under 13. Between 30-60,000 South Vietnamese were left blind, up to 150,000 more were amputees.--Gerald Caplan, The Globe and Mail.

How did the Kent State Massacre change your image of America?

Want another example of our 1960s revolutionary cold war? Get in your car and hit the button for your AM radio. Yes, you'll hear Rush Limbaugh, but you'll also hear something else: A conscious, reactionary movement that was created in response to the 1960s. It started in 1971 with something called the Powell Memorandum, drafted by future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell when he was a corporate lawyer giving advice to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He proposed what essentially was an infrastructure for reaction -- conservative think tanks that would try to create an intellectual halo around policies to dismantle the safety net, trade unionism and other policies that had created middle class prosperity, as well as a new conservative media.--Will Bunch, Daily Kos.

There's no dark side of the moon really. As a matter of fact: it's all dark.