May the fourth be with you.
No, I’m not lisping. To many people, including one or two that I actually respect, this is the day the nerds of the world celebrate the legacy of “Star Wars.”
I’ve got no problem with “Star Wars,” although I think it would have been nice if they had spent $5 less on special effects and $5 more on scripts. But I don’t sleep on Luke Skywalker sheets or decorate my home office with Jar Jar Binks figurines. I’m more of a baseball bobbleheads guy.
Still, May 4th means something different to me. It was a day in 1970 that was one of those evil days in my lifetime and ranks alongside Nov. 22, 1963, Sept. 11, 2001, and Jan. 6, 2021, as bad days to be an American.
It was the day Ohio National Guardsmen fired into a crowd of antiwar protestors at Kent State University, killing four students and wounding serval others.
It was just days after President Richard Nixon referred to those students opposed to his Vietnam War policy as “bums.”
In some ways, what happened 56 years ago today changed everything. We spent much of the previous decade horrified that white southerners could beat and even kill civil rights demonstrators, but we could write that off as racism. When all of a sudden, it was white Ohio kids shooting and killing other white Ohio kids, it was different.
Now we could exercise our right as free Americans to protest the actions of the government … and get killed.
Not that Americans have ever been overly tolerant of protestors, even when they have been speaking out against real injustice. During the struggle for civil rights, even many non-racist northerners wanted African-American demonstrators to show more patience and let things happen gradually.
The problem with “gradually,” especially in wars like Vietnam, is that people keep dying. When Nixon took office in January 1969, roughly 33,000 Americans had died. He claimed he had a secret plan to end the war, but it was still going on when he resigned five and a half years later and the final toll was more than 58,000 Americans.
So was protest valid?
You bet it was.
Unless you’re well past 60 now, you have no idea how it felt on May 4, 1970, to learn that the government had murdered four young people for protesting against a government policy. It happened two years before the Watergate break-in, but we all knew who Nixon was and who he wasn’t.
It’s easy to say a flawed man like Nixon couldn’t be elected these days, but people got stupid enough that Donald Trump has been elected twice. I firmly believe that if Nixon had never been president, neither would Trump. Nixon destroyed Americans’ trust in government and made much of what has happened since all too possible.
There are those who will say Lyndon Johnson was the real villain when it came to Vietnam, but 25,000 Americans still alive when he left office would tell a different story.
So today isn’t a day about fantasy movies. It’s a day to remember sadly, when so many of the things that have gone bad in our country got their start.