Reply #29: You really get the full measure of it [View All]

[liberalhistorian]

when you get to know the families and see just how painful it was and is for them and how they've suffered, and how they continue to suffer from the ignorance and hateful cruelty of so many idiots who still think those kids "got just what they deserved."

Especially the parents of Sandy Scheur, who was on her way to a speech pathology class (she was a speech therapy major). And the wounded students have some very painful wounds and memories as well that have never totally diminished after 34 years. I remember my first May 4 commemoration in 1986 (I transferred there), walking next to Mrs. Scheur during the candlelight march, then watching her face twisted in pain, the tears falling, when we arrived at the roped-off spot where her daughter fell, shot in the neck from THREE HUNDRED FEET AWAY FROM THE GUARD, as she walked to her speech class. A friend had asked her by phone the night before about all the turmoil on campus, and she told him "you'd know more about that than I would." She had the chance to go to Columbus with a friend that week, but she said she couldn't skip her classes.

And we're all really worried and nervous that it could very well happen again, since this administration is even worse than Nixon's. There is more than enough evidence that it was meant to happen, that Nixon, his henchmen, and James Rhodes (Ohio governor at the time, who visited the campus on May 3 and stirred up the Guard against the students, calling them "worse than the fascists and the brownshirts, they're the worst type of people we harbor in America", while Allison Krause (see my sig line) and her boyfriend were putting flowers in a National Guardsmen's gun barrel) planned it and congratulated themselves afterwards. Why do you think Nixon stonewalled the formation of an investigative committee and did everything possible to thwart and frustrate the work of the Scranton Commission (the name of the eventual investigative committee)? Sounds eerily familiar, doesn't it?