Reply #13: "They'll learn nothing" - but they did. [View All]

[tomreedtoon]

My own recollection was from an editorial in "Analog," the science fiction magazine, where the crotchety and Libertarian editor John Campbell wrote an editorial about the Kent State shootings. I didn't fully agree with it, but he raised some points to ponder.

His main point was that the clash was between two different editions of the same generation. The Kent State protestors were fairly wealthy kids who got to go to college. The National Guardsmen were of the same age, but were rural kids who never had the chance for education beyond high school and were basically working stiffs. The Guardsmen didn't see any point to the philosophical argument against the war. The protesters, to their viewpoint, were rioters plain and simple, and they were definitely not hard-working people like them.

Campbell's secondary point was that neither the protestors nor the Guardsmen had the worldly experience to handle what was happening; the Guardsmen fired out of panic, and the protestors didn't think the Guardsmen would fire. This was Campbell's most troubling point to me, but I had to concede he was right. No one had been seriously hurt in campus protests up to then; there was no expectation that deadly force would be used.

Campbell concluded by saying that no one - not the Guardsmen, not the protestors - would learn anything from the tragic confrontation. Here, he was wrong. Student marches and confrontations against the war had largely been a game for the students. They hadn't truly suffered, aside from tear gas or clubbing. When students saw they could be killed, it killed the student demonstrations quickly.

Which was a good thing, since the antiwar movement had spread beyond the college campuses; a wide variety of Americans were sick of the war by then, even if they didn't march. What Kent State did was say to the students, "Staging protests in the face of police lines can be fatal. Maybe there are more effective and less deadly ways for you to get your point across."

It's tragic that four lives had to be lost to learn that lesson, and that National Guardsmen had to bear the onus of those deaths on their consciences, but we were all stupid in the 60's and 70's, and we had to learn our lessons hard.