The Kent State Massacre: The Day Our Government Killed Innocent Protesters On A College Campus (theurbantwist.com)
Tamir Rice’s mother honors Kent State May 4 shooting victims at ‘Black Lives Matter’ commemoration (Cleveland Plain Dealer)
Donald Trump calls California protesters ‘thugs, criminals’ (bilbaoya.com)
When I was getting my Master’s degree in English Literature, and earlier when I was taking literature classes as I was getting my Bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing, one of my primary areas of focus was 20th century American women’s poetry. My favourite poet is Sylvia Plath, so that was kind of a natural choice for me. As I was doing research for papers on Plath, I once came across an article on her life in a right-wing political journal. That didn’t strike me as a natural place to be discussing poetry of any kind, much less Plath’s, but the article certainly fit in with the tone of the journal; it was full of ad hominem and dubious speculation, trying to portray Plath as the biggest brat of American arts and letters. I’ve never been able to figure out what would make Plath such a target for right-wing ire; as much as the content of her poems may contradict what social conservatives would like to push on America, I should think that modern music and film stars would be much better targets for them. (Then again, maybe the author just had a bad experience with Plath in high school English classes, and I can certainly sympathize with that.)
One of my English instructors in college was a student at Kent State University when four students were killed there by National Guard troops in 1970. That tragedy has always been part of my life — my parents were Vietnam War-protesting hippies, and they owned early Doonesbury anthologies that covered Garry Trudeau’s iconic cartoons of the era — and it’s become even more impossible to ignore since Star Wars fans took the anniversary of the tragedy, and turned it into “May the Fourth be with you” Day. It’s always a day when I can count on my social media feeds being nothing short of bipolar.
Just like that one conservative tried to recast Sylvia Plath’s legacy in that article I read back in undergrad, the start of each May also brings attempts by right-wing writers to relitigate what happened at Kent State, to try to justify the killings. It’s not something that ever gains much traction in the American mainstream, but it does a good job of playing to far-right “good old days” nostalgia for times past. As much as they try to cast that nostalgia in terms of economics, most of the discussion centres around the social aspects of that time. Remember, that was a time when homosexuality was treated as a mental disease, counterculture was easily avoidable, and no one made a big fuss if you lynched some dark-skinned people every now and then. Even when modern-day conservatives openly oppose those elements of the “good old days,” they still openly pine for the stifling conformity of that era.
We may arguably be living in a post-counterculture era; it was easier to “hide” figures like Lenny Bruce and Bettie Page in a pre-Internet, pre-thousand-and-one cable channel America. For all the boons and ills of social media, it’s increased the spectrum of available media and celebrities to an exponential degree, and even “undiscovered” talents now benefit from new funding models to reach sustainability doing whatever it is that they do. The stereotype may be that conservatives are the ones who fear change, but I know people of all ideologies who feel overwhelmed by the rapid changes in modern life these days. If nothing else, a lot of us yearn for the days when leaving work for the day actually meant leaving work, and not having to keep doing all sorts of stuff from home and taking calls from our bosses late at night.
Still, I personally don’t know anyone who wants to go back to the culture of Eisenhower-era America. For all that it may have given us the beat poets, the conformity and brutality of that time far, far outweighs what good came from that time. Modern media may be full of people spouting unbelievably ignorant bullshit, but I would rather hear them than have them silenced, mainly because I know that my blogs and whatnot are “ignorant bullshit” to some people and I don’t want to be silenced either.
As this current presidential campaign has gone on, it’s been impossible to ignore all the news stories about the violence happening at Donald Trump rallies to anti-Trump protesters who get inside those rallies. I think there’s a lot to be said for keeping protests outside of a venue — Bernie Sanders spoke about this with Rachel Maddow this past Friday — but I’ve always been a big believer in non-violent civil disobedience, and I understand why so many people find something so abhorrent in Trump’s presidential campaign (and perhaps the man himself) that they believe the risks involved with disrupting his events are worth it in order to get their own voices heard.
Trump became the last surviving Republican candidate for president on May the fourth, when John Kasich dropped out. That’s forty-six years to the day of the Kent State shootings. I find it hard to believe that I’m the only person who finds that downright chilling.
There have been a lot of arguments over how closely Trump’s beliefs fall in line with those of the typical Republican in 2016, but one aspect in which Trump is just like any other conservative politician is his seeming inability to brook opposing views. Trump often comes off as taking any opinions contrary to his own as a personal attack, and speaking as someone who went through a phase like that years ago (it’s certainly not unique to conservatives), it makes you appear like a total jerk. Trump has endured some unfair attacks during this campaign — all the Republicans did, and as much as I may dislike their politics and policies, I believe no one should have to put up with that kind of crap — but he reacts just as fiercely to a legitimate opposing opinion as he does when he’s unjustly smeared.
It’s frighteningly easy for me to see something like the Kent State shootings happening under a President Trump. We’re not that far removed from the brutal crackdowns on Occupy protests, and in the years that have passed we’ve had news story after news story about police officers shooting and killing unarmed African-American civilians, along with a right-wing backlash that seemingly seeks to justify every one of those deaths before the facts can even be found out in a court of law. Remember, we’re only four years removed from conservatives cheering on the death of a hypothetical American who didn’t have health insurance — during a Republican presidential debate, no less — and Trump supporters frequently cheer on his call to kill the families of alleged terrorists, among other potential atrocities.
I can’t put a firm percentage on the likelihood that liberal protesters will be shot and killed by law enforcement if Donald Trump wins the presidency, but it’s damn sure too high for my comfort level. Even if I never physically attend a protest myself, I’m not sure that I’d be safe from being targeted like that. I sure hope I can make some friends in Canada here soon, because I’m feeling more and more like I’m going to need them sooner rather than later.