It was a sad day.  The line had been crossed.  There were more than enough
guns and more than enough anger.  I remember the following weeks in slow
motion bits of conversations.  A warning that expulsion of my ass was already
on the mind of the school president, an angry converstation with my dad a
week later.  He was in an MBA program and no student picket line was going to
keep him from going to class...and me declaring that he didn't have to worry
about the picket line, 'cause he'd never get out of the driveway.

Dad and I chose not to fight it out in the driveway.  We went into the back
yard and had a beer.  Later that summer we did almost three weeks on the
Adirondak canoe trail.  Not good times.  But turning times.  Later that
summer white middle class folks, my fathers age or so, were protesting on the
village green in Westport.  It was not my generation that ended that
goddamned war...it was theirs.  I don't care what Brokaw thinks.  I think
their moment of greatness came when they chose not to order their children to
shoot their children.

I hated being a "hippie radical"  I wanted desperately to be a patriot.  I
grieved the loss of life that day.  I also grieved the loss of the pride and
innocense of the young guardsmen.

Let us not forget Jackson State.

Thanks for the flashback Larry.  I think.

-jc

Lawrence Kestenbaum wrote:

> Just the other day, I heard the old 1970 hippie anthem on the radio, and
> it all came back:
>
>        Did you pay your dues?
>        Did you read the news?
>        This morning, when the paper landed in your yard
>        Do you know their names?
>
> Yes, my brain replied instantly, I know their names.
>
> Allison Krause.  Bill Schroeder.  Sandy Lee Scheuer.  Jeffrey Miller.
>
> Probably some of y'all, of a certain age, know those names, too.  Solid
> Midwestern German-American names, all of them (Miller usually comes from
> Mueller).  Clean, normal college kids, not druggies or radical agitators.
> It's a funny kind of fame that comes from dying under those circumstances.
> Another kid was crippled that day, but he lived, and I don't know his
> name.
>
> I was a high school sophomore then, one of the editors of a left-wing
> student paper.  I don't even want to think about the mood of May 1970, the
> rage and fear and excitement of that time, the sense that the era of
> "sharing and laughing" (as in the lyrics of that same song) was turning to
> bullets and blood.  Fortunately, we were wrong about that.
>
> Some think the "Sixties" (the concept, not the numerical decade) ended
> that day.  I would put it a bit later, maybe in 1972 or 1973, but Michigan
> State was always a step behind the times.  The last big antiwar
> demonstration in East Lansing happened in mid-May 1973; ours was the only
> major campus to decide that the mining of Haiphong Harbor was worth
> demonstrating against.
>
> We have all come a long way in thirty-two years.  But May 4 always stirs
> up the old memories.
>
>                                   Larry
>
> ---
> Lawrence Kestenbaum, [log in to unmask]
> Washtenaw County Commissioner, 4th District
> The Political Graveyard, http://politicalgraveyard.com
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> Mailing address: P.O. Box 2563, Ann Arbor MI 48106
>
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