There’s a new book out by Howard Means on the 1970 Kent State University massacre: 67 Shots: Kent State and the End of American Innocence. In our March/April/May issue of the Washington Monthly, Michael O’Donnell was a good review that neatly summarizes the interesting points and asks us to apply the lessons of that tragedy to our heated political discourse today.
It’s probably forgotten that just prior to the incident at Kent State some of the most prominent political leaders in the country had some pretty incendiary things to say about campus protestors.
Three days before the shooting, Nixon famously described antiwar protestors as “bums blowing up the campuses.” “No more appeasement,” said Ronald Reagan, then the governor of California. “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with.” Ohio Governor Jim Rhodes promised to “eradicate” the problem of campus protest.
That’s right, in the lead-up to Kent State, California Governor Ronald Reagan said that antiwar student protesters should not be appeased and that “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with.” If a National Guardsman took that rhetoric seriously, why wouldn’t they start a bloodbath?
Flash forward to today, and we’ve just gotten news that Donald Trump’s campaign manager Corey Lewandowski has been charged with misdemeanor battery for assaulting a reporter.
And far be it from the Trump campaign to show any remorse, responsibility or leadership:
The Trump campaign released a statement in response to the charge:
Mr. Lewandowski was issued a Notice to Appear and given a court date. He was not arrested. Mr. Lewandowski is absolutely innocent of this charge. He will enter a plea of not guilty and looks forward to his day in court. He is completely confident that he will be exonerated.
It’s easy to forget how important it is to have cool-headed leadership. Without it, people can take irresponsible talk as a cue to commit violence.
That’s at least part of the story of what happened at Kent State, where four students were killed and nine others were wounded, including one who was permanently paralyzed.
We should head O’Donnell’s warning:
Yet a guardsman itching to beat down a hippie wouldn’t be alone in thinking that a bloodbath was needed—Ronald Reagan himself had said as much. If troopers thought the protesters were bums, deserving nothing more than the consideration due a bum, they had an ally in the president of the United States. It is no stretch to imagine that these ugly sentiments, expressed by men of stature, helped ease the finger off the safety for at least some guardsmen. Our own politics have become such a festival of hatred that we should stop and take note—before someone else gets hurt.
Make sure to read the whole thing.
Er, that long tradition of physically beating down the left is still with us, too. From both establishments.
And from supposed liberals like Jon Chait!
I was in junior high school in California in 1966 when Reagan was elected governor, using the same beat-the-hippies rhetoric in regards to the University of California. He also set into motion systematic disinvestment in California’s public universities. When my brother began at UCLA in the late 60s, quarterly tuition was a few hundred dollars. Hard to imagine, right? The UC system truly was for any student who could qualify, regardless of socioeconomic class.
OT: The rage of Trump fans isn’t new. I’ve dealt with it for years.
As a Chicago Tribune columnist, I saw how angry white people became when the racial order was threatened.
By Dawn M. Turner March 29 at 11:27 AM
During the past six months, I’ve watched media outlets work themselves into a tizzy over the violence and hatred orchestrated by Donald Trump supporters. Commentators act like this is a relatively new phenomenon. But I know firsthand how any challenge to the nation’s established racial order makes some white folks lose their minds and their decorum.
For more than a decade, I wrote a column in the Chicago Tribune that often focused on race. Before Trump gave his supporters license to give in to their lesser selves and convey their hatred in mixed company, they did so in my email box. They are part of a disaffected angry knot of Americans who feel as though they’ve been bruised by diversity.
My experience isn’t unique. Any writer who has dared train a lens on race, women’s issues, social justice issues, immigration, abortion, sexuality, you name it, has faced some of the most vile backlash around.
Once, my neighbor, a dear friend who happens to be a white Republican woman, said to me, “I don’t know how you read the comments at the end of your column.”
I told her that they were nothing compared to my emails. It’s one thing to see these people on television or online, but to interact with them is quite another matter.
They helped created it.
Coddle it.
Humor it.
Poo-pooed those of us who pointed it out.
Phuck all of them…they created it, and the only reason that they are pointing it out is because it’s too damn obvious. They were quite content to hide behind the bullshyt all these years.
Once again, I’ll point out that THIS is the reason they’re mad with Trump. Because he took away their camoflage and plausible deniability.
………….
Eric Boehlert
@EricBoehlert
Seven Years Late, Media Elites Finally Acknowledge GOP’s Radical Ways;
https://twitter.com/EricBoehlert/status/714840953169833984?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
○ Call Out the National Guard: May 1-3, 1970, at Kent State April 30th, 2006
○ “They Just Started Shooting Us Down” — Kent State May 3th, 2006
Please visit our new home – May 4 Task Force.
○ President Richard Nixon – Address to the Nation on the Situation in Southeast Asia (April 30, 1970) plus Video
How insulting to compare the shooting of protestors to whatever Lewandowski did (the video didn’t clarify that for me at all). People who protested Nixon’s escalation of the Vietnam War accepted that there was some physical risk to themselves and hopefully not too painful. (A Lewandowski style touch (that’s legally all that’s required for battery) would hardly have been noticed.) What we didn’t expect was that we could be shot and killed. We were naive because that wouldn’t have been foreign to those that had once protested in the US and protestors in other countries.
In real time we got that the language used by Nixon, Reagan, and Rhodes was a contributing factor to those deaths. Why the hell do you think that we loathe those individuals to this very day and made the effort to shut tamp down such speech by public officials? They didn’t like calls for PC speech anymore than the idiots today that bristle against it, but it falls within that broad category of yelling fire in a theater that endangers the life of others.
What gave you the idea that I’m comparing a case of battery with shooting people?
The comparison is with public officials setting bad examples that can lead to serious violence.
Trump is a public official? Who knew.
Do LEOs even need violent rhetoric from public officials anymore to bash a few heads in or shoot innocent kids? Or has it been in the air so long that it’s now fully internalized. This sort of speech was reduced in the 1970s after Kent and Jackson State, but came roaring back in code in the 80s, along with a restoration of a glorified military ready to go kick some butt and glorified violence in movies.
Trump and his merry trumpers are nasty bullies and in a functioning society, they would be labeled as such and not considered suitable for high office. But the same could be said for any of the warmongers that the majority approves of and votes for with the full knowledge that they won’t hesitate to send bombs anywhere in the world that they damn well please. (Yeah, “bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” was so funny.)
In this instance, you have likened a reporter and a campaign staffer and a shove to student protestors and panicky and poorly trained National Guardsmen and shooting the protestors. There are probably thousands of more apt analogies to Trump speech and Lewandoski’s act than the one you presented. Of course, it would be difficult to find one reported that didn’t result in more serious assault and battery than what took place in this instance. Assuming that his behavior was totally inappropriate to the situation. (I can think of a few instances where a shove may have changed history.)
I don’t think the post infers sameness to the end result of or type of violence, and Trump is at least tantamount to a public official–he is the leading republican candidate for the office of President of the United States after all. The point of it all is that people like Trump who agitate for violence have some responsibility for that violence, whether it is murder or bruises and whether that agitation was required to achieve the result. In fact, Reagan calling for blood and Trump calling for protesters to be beat, seem like direct agitation for the very result each got. How exactly do they bear no blame?
I don’t see how anybody could reasonably think the bruising of an arm is like the spilling of blood. In all the of things the right wing has done to protesters or people they don’t like, Kent State probably ranks as the most brutal and stupid. But that doesn’t excuse Trump for criticism for the same sort of agitation. We don’t need to wait for someone to die to call him out on it. The bruising of her arm is certainly not the best recent example though, just the most recent event.
I don’t think the group that curb stomped the Move On woman at the Rand Paul rally felt any consequences…
The Right very seldom does. The hyperventilating is usually enough to inoculate them.
Republicans share the distaste for pinkos and other crybabies and are the ones who have always buttered law enforcement’s bread.
I’m not one for false equivalence but, when it comes to hatred, it would be helpful to look in the mirror. We can’t change others. We can only change ourselves.
I grew up in a working class neighborhood. Many of those I grew up with are now right-wingers and tea party types. They are not evil. They’re merely ignorant. I was from a Jewish family with a strong focus on education. Otherwise, I might be very much like them. So there but for the grace of God (or at least religious culture) go I. This applies to all of us.
My wife is a psychologist. Unlike many in her profession, she really helps people. They get better over time. I asked her what the key is to effective psychotherapy. Her answer was that it’s not the application of any particular philosophy or technique. They all have strengths and weaknesses. The key she said is to love. She loves her patients and they feel it and their hopes open and they take in what she says.
When we make people wrong, they’ll never change their minds. When we hold them with compassion, they may open to new possibilities. And if it doesn’t heal them, well maybe it will heal us.
Very nice.
Thanks my friend.
Where I wrote, “their hopes open,” I obviously meant their hearts open. But the Freudian slip was a good one because hope is a key too. We all need it and she gives her patients hope. It’s so easy to lose hope and lose heart. It’s so easy to grow tired and weary and cynical. A breath of optimism may be one of the greatest gifts we can offer to those we love (which can include everyone).
Years ago, when I was 18, I had an extraordinary experience. I was at a course called the 6-Day. It was given by an organization called est and it was their advanced course at the time. Est wasn’t religious. It was part of the human-potential movement of the time and was more of a philosophical/experiential journey. It had value and survives to this day as the Landmark Forum. But what happened to me went far beyond anything est taught.
After day upon day of enormous breakthrough, something unexpected occurred. I was standing by the lake and I had this profound epiphany, a sort of download. There was incredible joy that I could barely contain and, with it, knowledge and wisdom. There are no words for it. I can only say that it came to me from somewhere outside myself. It’s the kind of experience people describe as religious.
It was one of the most profound experiences of my life, perhaps the most profound. It opened me. At that time I would have said I an agnostic. After that, I felt it more than a bit likely that God exists in some form. It turned me into a spiritual seeker. Still, in a lifetime of seeking, I’ve never equaled that experience.
One of the downloads that came in that experience was that we can know stuff without knowing how we know it. Second, I got that life goes on in some form after we leave this world. I don’t know what that looks like but I got that I didn’t need to be afraid of what follows. I saw that everyone and everything is deeply and profoundly connected in ways that go way beyond anything that would make sense to our minds. You and I are not truly separate, even though I don’t know you. We’re all part of a fabric. I saw that the understanding of the mind is just the first layer of understanding. And, perhaps most important of all, I saw that in this world there’s both good and bad, joy and sorrow, blessing and tragedy. But reality is so much larger than this world and the thin slice of reality we see. When one gets just beyond the material world that we know and the limitations of the mind, there’s a vast realm where everything is wonderful.
Don’t ask me to prove these assertions. Of course I can’t. But the experience has stuck with me. Until then, I agonized over whether the world was an essentially good or bad place. At age 18, I received this gift. And at age 52, it integrates really well into the spiritual teachings at the core of my life, which are Sufi.
As a result of that experience, I’ve had an essentially unshakable optimism ever since. Not a Panglossian or unthinking optimism (at least not in my view). I see that the world is full of pain and injustice. I know that evil people come along and cause untold suffering. I know too that sometimes events that are not under the control of humans cause suffering. I know that life is not fair. And yet I have faith that beyond this world lies a realm where none of that matters. I don’t know why we’re here but I have faith that there is meaning. My sense is it has something to do with learning to open our hearts in the face of pain and deprivation and tragedy. It also has something to do with choosing love over fear and its cousins, anger and hatred. Only in a world like this can we be develop such skills. If life were easy or fair, of course we would love because that’s our core nature. In a place like this, where it’s hard, we get to learn to choose right over wrong, like over dark, love over hate, compassion over anger.
I care for what you have to share here, and for your generosity in sharing it.
“The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice” works for me as a truth which is both historically supported and spiritually fortifying. It encourages, provides perspective and comfort while reminding us that history is full of people who took actions which bent that arc.
Along with the horrendous polling Trump has with the general electorate, I have an instinct that the American electorate, in whole, is not an group of people who support all that Trump represents. I think the Republican Party electorate would be delivering us a horrendously unpleasant general election campaign if they end up handing their nomination to Trump, but I am becoming anxious to have this fight out.
This unrepentant, unsophisticated racism and nationalism is where the GOP base has been heading for a long time; it’s time for all of us to see that there are not enough racists and nationalists to win the Presidency in 2016, no matter how transcendently famous and “entertaining” their chosen candidate may be.
Americans are not an entirely emotionally healthy people with a well-adjusted society, but even my own cynicism does not allow me to believe that Trump would be a significant threat in the general. That does not mean it’s time to take our ease; I want our movement to help complete a campaign which leaves Trump and his movement in the dust, with us running up a smashing victory. Overwhelming victories over those who propose to dominate us seems the best way to restore some cultural equilibrium here.
Thanks cf. I’m not particularly fearful of Trump. I’m pretty sure Clinton would crush him. With Sanders it’s more unpredictable but I’d be knocking on every door I could and be making phone calls like a madman. Talk about a high-stakes gamble.
Well said Center (and Para).
I also don’t much fear Trump. I think it’s just faith.
It’s true that Americans are not emotionally healthy with a completely well adjusted society, but we do, on average, try like hell to do the right thing. To ‘be good’, I suppose. There is a reason overt racism and sexism became what Trump followers like to call politically correct. It’s because the majority wants to be better.
We won’t elect him, and it won’t be close. If Cruz is the nominee, we won’t elect him either. And it won’t be close.
As far as hate….you don’t have to go far to find it, just scroll up. And you don’t have to go far to see its corrosive effects, just browse recent posts.
.
Dude, you are like totally blowing my mind. But without sarcasm, you actually are. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks, GS. I appreciate your comment.
Thank you for sharing this.
I can’t say that I ever had much regard for est–I knew people in grad school who were est devotees and thought what they had to say about est was psychobabble–but if it provided impetus towards a spiritual opening for you, then great.
I was in my late 40s when I realized to my great surprise that I wanted/needed to explore the spiritual dimension of existence. My path turned out to be a different one than yours, but learning to open my heart, and learning how to cultivate compassion, have absolutely been fundamental.
est had some serious problems. I was blown open by the 6-Day but there was a lot of bullshit in that organization and I walked away from it a few years later.
Around five years ago I did Landmark and thought it worthwhile. Unlike est, it was offered at an affordable price. They’ve also shortened it by really boiling the lessons down to their essence. But it’s not the only good thing out there anymore. The rest of the world has kind of caught up. Of course est had a lot to do with that. Back in the late 70s, they were blowing people open.
As for spiritual paths, I don’t think it matters which one is chosen so long as it opens the heart. That’s the real test of its value. My shaykh used to say the essence of religion is five qualities: peace, love, mercy (we might say compassion), justice and freedom. If any of those are missing or compromised, the religion is compromised. He also said, “If everyone knew his religion well, there would be just one religion — the religion of peace, love, mercy, justice and freedom.”
PS: I came out of the 6-Day in this really weird space. I would sometimes know what people were thinking. I would get these downloads of knowledge. It was freaky. That stuff didn’t last long and it wasn’t anything they taught. Like I said, the course blew me into spiritual spaces I wasn’t ready for. But it wasn’t the intention of the program to do that; it just happened. I didn’t stay there long and I’ve not been back since. But I know my shaykh, before he died this past summer, was able to see right to the core of things. He was in constant states of deep prayer and was shown things. He spoke of being able to see with the eye of his heart. He could see to the core of relationships even if the other person wasn’t present. He could see each person’s essence, even before they were born.
Having had a glimpse of that place where one receives knowledge, I know it’s possible. The weird way he could see right through all of us just confirmed it for me. Sufism is a spiritual path that’s been around for a very long time and they actually teach one how to reach the experiences I was blown into just after the 6-Day. But I’m nowhere near those levels. Getting there in a sustainable way requires a great deal of sustained effort. I’ve had tiny tastes as a Sufi but nothing like what I experienced at age 18.
I also grew up working class and Jewish–truly a vanished socioeconomic class in the United States in the present day. Most of my parents’ friends were likewise working class and Jewish. Neither my parents nor their friends wanted their children to follow in their footsteps. They all wanted their kids to get an education. They were all reflexive Democrats. I was an adult before I realized there were Republican Jews, and I still can’t quite grasp the absurdity of that fact.
Yes, me too. I wound up a lawyer. Typical, huh? I often felt in law school that, as a Jew, I had an enormous, even unfair, advantage over these sincere Christian kids who worked so hard but mostly didn’t do that well. The non-Jews would be looking for “the answer.” The Jews, used to looking at things from every conceivable angle and having no commitment to a particular answer, knew from day one what they were trying to show us. In law school they try to teach you to think like a lawyer, but we already did. We were taught to think like that around the kitchen tables in our homes.
The best students at my school were predominantly, albeit not exclusively, Jewish. Even those who didn’t excel got by just fine without working hard. I felt sorry for those poor kids who didn’t get it. They’d work so hard, trying to do well, and get disappointed again and again. Of course, doing well in law school is a very poor predictor of success as a lawyer. Beyond law school, having connections becomes really important as does knowing how to navigate among people of privilege. In that domain, those from wealthy families had enormous, and yes, unfair, advantages.
Yes, they shot hippies. They also killed three and injured 28 in Orangeburg, SC and killed two and injured 12 at Jackson State in Mississippi. Remember them too.
Life Magazine in covering the Kent State Massacre ran a picture of Adjutant General Castlebury unidentified in the caption holding up a pistol, gas mask propped up on his head, and yelling. Despite the alibis there is every indication that Castelbury ordered his troops to fire and it is likely that he was carrying out the Governor’s orders.
And 1971, the anti-war movement collapsed on campus as parents all over the US told their kids that if they ever got involved in a protest, they would no longer be going to college. That is called playing hardball, something that Nixon and Reagan and Republicans in general prided themselves on. And still do.
You cannot count on it being just demagoguery or rhetorical flourish. Some of these guys are deadly serious about what they will do. The difficulty is figuring out which ones they are.
Management types in Chicago commuting home to their North Shore residences through the Northwestern campus on the evening of May 4, 1970, rolled down their windows and unloaded some furious invective on the 5000 students lining Sheridan Road. At that moment in history, the “Greatest Generation” seemed to hate its own offspring. That was shocking given the amount of values education pushed on those same offspring in the 1950s. Whaadaya mean, you weren’t serious? That standing up for principles is for chumps?
Nasty stuff being said about protesters repeated in the O’Donnell article. There are, I’m sure, many different ways to interpret this. For me – someone who has come to despise America as it exists today – this is confirmation of my bias. I am not so foolish as to put myself at risk, but I would be lying if I said I would be upset by violence here in America. Every person murdered by the US military – murders ordered by even President Obama – is due some sort of justice. And if that justice takes the form of political violence this election year or next, well…
“…if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
Wow, you’re not kidding when you say you’re angry.