By Rabbi Ben Kamin
HIRAM, OHIO—Not too many miles from here, at Kent State University, a dreadful moment is recalled today—May 4, 1970. In the quagmire of the misbegotten Vietnam War, in a nation polarized and traumatized from a decade of civil unrest, racial crucibles, and the successive assassinations of major leaders, the wanton killings of four undergraduate students at that northern Ohio campus, and the serious wounding of several others, became the terrible coda of an all-too frightening and dangerous period of American history.
Ohio State National Guardsmen, having been given the order by then-governor James Rhodes, opened fire with live ammunition as students protested the Vietnam War on the open greens of the university. It was a kind of madness that shocked even those who had been numbed by the violence of the 1960s. We who had grown used to the searing news bulletins of snipers, riots, and napalm storms in Indochina found ourselves recoiling with a new sense of grief and vulnerability.
My Cincinnati high school class was about to graduate. The petrifying news from upstate burned into our consciousness. Even now, we think of the families of the peach-faced kids who were gunned down in the sunlight; their agonies have never been fully healed. And we, the bright-eyed but blinking seniors of 1970, were generally headed for college campuses—or, in too many cases, to Vietnam.
We were afraid, we were wary, we were in danger in those days, even as we carried personal feelings of connection with many of the men and women who led us in politics, music, poetry, and social justice. We mourned the martyrs of our time, the iconic Kennedy brothers as well as Dr. King.
But we also identified with a host of guitarists and lyricists and writers and countless, faceless soldiers, nurses, chaplains, Freedom Riders, students, and housewives who marched and even died in favor of a better society. They taught us to crave values more than valuables and, to paraphrase the Hebrew Scripture, to choose life.
Forty-one years ago today, in this now-economically stricken state, this paradigm of American social futility and rust, we high school seniors were about to don caps and gowns and take our places in civilization. Now, as I teach for a while here in Ohio about that confounding decade of the civil rights saga, Vietnam, moon-landings, and murdered heroes, I wipe a tear away on this gloomy anniversary of May 4.
God rest the souls.
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Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer based in San Diego. He may be reached at ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com