50 years of Kent State

I realize that the times in this country seem to be crazy, but fifty years ago we also had a divided country and although the division was based around a war rather than the suitability of the President to hold office along with a pandemic, it still was very similar to what we are currently going through as a country.

The Kent State incident is now fifty years old and the students that were there that day are around seventy or older today, but I'm willing to venture a guess that they see many parallels to the current division in the nation to what the competing sides during the Vietnam War.
What is different between the two eras is this- many of the folks that protested the government for its participation are now protesting in favor of the person that has caused such division today.

My grandfather told me something that I never forgot about one's political stance through the years-
"Most people start life on the left and gradually drive right as they age".
My experience has been that he has been generally correct and although how far one drifts will vary, I would say that more people than not move to the right at least somewhat and some move far right.
It would be interesting to see how many people in the "Kent State" demographic that support the President fervently also were involved to a certain degree against the Vietnam War.
My guess is that a large chunk would be in that group and the amount might be as high as a slight majority of the people in the overall number of anti-war protesters.

I've always been interested in the Kent State story, at first because I lived in Northeast/central Ohio at the time, although I don't remember the tragedy as I was two months shy of my second birthday, but I was always intrigued on our visits to Ohio that saw us drive by the Kent State exit and as I learned more and more about what happened, I evolved on the issue.
At first, I was interested in who gave the order for the National Guard to fire on the Kent State students and that moved onto what were the guardsmen thinking when they fired on American citizens and how many of them had regrets and why they would have them.
Now I wonder this- If I were in my early 50s in 1970, where would I have stood on the protests?
It's easy to say that we support the right to protest, it's hard to watch people protesting when you vehemently disagree with their stance.
It is easy to say that people should speak their peace when you are in line with their ideas, it's hard to
to approve of people doing the same when you don't agree with their protests at all.

I think about this all the time when I see people protesting the President with others similarly backing him and usually, I think something like this- How many of these people actually consider how the other side thinks?
How many people think that because you protest a government action means that you don't love your country?
How many people are considered to be sheep and of limited intelligence because you support a particular officeholder or candidate?
Why is it so difficult to realize that because you disagree on politics that one doesn't have to fit into a generality?
I have friends that support the President and I'm fine with that.
I'm generally not a person that feels the need to "turn everyone in my direction", just hear me out, I'll return the favor, and hopefully, we can make each other think a bit.
I'm not trying to win people over, but we can have a civil conversation and move on.
And if the friend in question isn't someone that can accept that, then we don't have to talk about it!
Problem solved.

I wonder if in our times that we aren't sitting in wait for a tragedy.
When you consider the tension of this point in history and with so many on edge, it only takes one loss of temper or one mistake by someone in charge for this to happen again and it might not even come from a military order or National Guard either.
It could be a civilian believing that they are acting on non-existent orders or a mentally disturbed individual to act and think they are doing something good.
I know we all think that we have division among us right now, imagine if a loss of life occurs and it turns out to be started from someone for any of those reasons.
Remember that two of the four people that died at Kent State were not protestors or involved at all, Sandra Scheuer and William Schroeder were walking to class before being hit by rifle shots from a football field away.
Just think of the turmoil, if innocent people would get caught up in something similar today.

I've been to the Kent State site twice and I'd like to return one more time to visit the visitors center that was in the building stages on Cherie and I's last visit.
I recently watched a documentary on the rock musician David Crosby and as Crosby visited various places in his life that affected him, one of those places was Kent State's center dedicated to May 4th, 1970 with Crosby's association with the University from the CSNY song based on the tragedy.
Just looking at it as Crosby walked through, it looked quite interesting.

I'm not sure what we've really learned from Kent State in the last fifty years.
We haven't learned to understand what it means to be tolerant of others' beliefs and we certainly haven't learned to be able to disagree politically and still not take it personally.
I suppose some things are just too sad to explain.
I don't have an explanation and with luck, I won't have to find a way to explain it again.