The quotable digby: four dead in ohio

The 40th Anniversary was last week.  Digby quotes from Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland and notes that an awful lot of people around the country cheered the deaths of those kids and expressed the wish that more had been shot dead.  Some of these people were parents themselves who said they'd have thought their own children deserved to die if they’d been out protesting the War.  digby:

I often make the mistake of thinking that America didn't used to be so mean. That's a middle aged person's error, I'm afraid --- from one who is beginning to fall prey to nostalgia for her youth. I am genuinely shocked by the callousness of people who laugh at a mentally ill person being shot with a taser and I'm sickened that people blithely suggest that terrorist suspects should be stripped of their citizenship and tortured --- but then I always was shocked by this harsh worldview. I just forget sometimes what it was really like.

I remember that.  Not just the day but the vicious reaction.  I also remember that it was around then that Pop Mannion told me that if the war was still going on when I reached draft age he would buy my ticket to Canada and put me on the bus himself.

Comments

[mac macgillicuddy]

I was 12 but I remember Kent State like it was yesterday. I may remember where I was when I heard about it more vividly than I remember where I was when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. I also remember how vicious the country's reaction was, and I remember Agnew's calling college students "bums."

And I'm amazed that to this day, no one can "figure out" who gave the order to fire...

[Gary Farber]

The weird thing is that a day doesn't go past that I don't keep this in mind, I *never* forget it for a moment, and I'm endlessly surprised countless times a day at all the folks who will say things like "say, Bush makes Nixon look pretty good, eh?" and "that Nixon was a real liberal, I wish we had him in office today," and so on.

People have terribly short memories. It won't be long before we're hearing how George W. Bush was pretty thoughtful and liberal compared to this current crop of no-good Republicans; they're not reasonable, like Republicans and conservatives used to be.

[Linkmeister]

An audiotape has just been analyzed which seems to show that the Guard was specifically ordered to prepare to fire that day, with no "sniper" provocation, as was claimed by some.

"Guard!" says a male voice on the recording, which two forensic audio experts enhanced and evaluated at the request of The Plain Dealer. Several seconds pass. Then, "All right, prepare to fire!"

"Get down!" someone shouts urgently, presumably in the crowd. Finally, "Guard! . . . " followed two seconds later by a long, booming volley of gunshots. The entire spoken sequence lasts 17 seconds.

Audio at the link.