Things were pretty scary in the spring of 1970. The Vietnam War, which we'd thought was winding down had instead just been expanded into a new front, Cambodia. I was in high school. My classmates and I tried to speculate on which of us would be drafted into the military after we graduated in a few years and what we'd do if that happened. Our ideas  ranged between fleeing for Canada as many draft-resisters had already done or resigning ourselves to the inevitable. Anger erupted everywhere at then-President Richard Nixon's unilateral decision to expand a misbegotten and arguably unwinnable war. Fiery speeches were delivered in classrooms and in the halls of congress. Antiwar protests, a rarity in my defense-industry-heavy and oh, so Republican hometown, grew in urgency and intensity virtually overnight in cities only a few hours' drive away. At the local university there was talk of a student and faculty strike.

As I recall, I got the news of the Kent State shootings by word-of-mouth, the horrifying news trickling down from one frightened and appalled classmate to another, confirmed every hour on the hourly news from the top-40 rock radio station we all listened to, and televised in inglorious detail that evening on the 6 o'clock news. The first thought to cross my adolescent brain was that after years of protests, civil-disobedience and police riots, my country had finally and utterly lost it. As crazy as things had gotten, I had believed up to that point that there was a limit; things might get out of hand, but surely we'd stop before we went over the edge. Now it appeared that we'd gone over it, or that the virtual guardrail that I'd pictured had never been there in the first place.

Visions of a second civil war danced in my head. Indeed, Crosby, Stills Nash and Young's hastily-recorded single “Ohio”, made in response to the shootings, alluded to it (“Gotta get down to it/Soldiers are cutting us down/Should have been done long ago”*). I'd read an article in Life magazine a year earlier written by an antiwar demonstrator who'd been arrested and taken away to a makeshift holding camp along with dozens of others and who had along with everyone else had been physically and verbally abused by his captors in a scene straight out of the Stanford Prison Experiment. Was that, I wondered, the kind of thing we were in for? Martial law? Military tribunals? Pitched battles in the streets? It all seemed all too possible now.  One of my father's business associates glibly remarked that the Guard didn't kill enough students. The owner of a downtown pizza shop I frequented, a burly Greek who otherwise supported Nixon and Greek-American vice-president Spiro Agnew one-hundred-and-ten per cent said the shootings were a tragedy. Someone marketed t-shirts with bullseyes printed on them, imprinted with the words “STUDENT TARGET”.

The Kent State shootings were my generation's 9-11. While they weren't in the same league as hijacked airliners being flown into fully-occupied skyscrapers, they were every bit as shocking, appalling and disgusting. And unlike 9-11 which was the work of foreign terrorists, this was an instance of the state attacking its own citizens with deadly force. To this day, no one seems to know what provoked the shootings. At best, they were a supreme screw-up. At worst, they were an incredible act of cowardice.

My current take on the events of May 4, 1970 is that they were a contemporary application of an old slave-owner trick; if you want to keep 100 slaves in line, kill one of them in front of the others. On this, the 40^th anniversary of the Kent State massacre, I fully expect the usual talk-show garbage-mouths to declare that the protesters were a bunch of liberal traitors, that they had it coming, that the Ohio Guardsmen were just following orders, and that authorities from President Nixon on down all did the right things to protect our freedom. I wouldn't ever dignify that kind of verbal flatulence with a response, except to say that even the reek of it cannot drown out the stench of one of America's most public acts of violence against its own people.

* "Ohio", Copyright 1970 Neil Young, Cotillion/Broken Arrow music.