On October 15th the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam was conducted throughout the United States. Hundreds of colleges and high schools were closed, millions of Americans wore black armbands, and people from all walks of life joined the marches, rallies, vigils, and teach-ins, but then on May 4th, 1970 at Kent State University, in the heart of America, without provocation, twenty-eight National Guardsmen fired on several hundred unarmed and defenseless students who were part of a peaceful demonstration protesting the war, ROTC, and the oppressiveness of the university.
Thirteen seconds late, four students were dead, and nine other students were wounded, and one student was paralyzed for life. Nineteen year-old Sandra Scheuer, an honor student in speech therapy laid dead, shot in the neck. Her only crime was walking across campus to her next class. Just a few hours before she was looking in the mirror and wondering if the new blouse that she recently bought was the right shade of green for the color of her hair. On the bed was a teddy bear that she had as a child. Just the touch of the fur reassured her that she was surrounded by people who cared for her.
Allison Krause was also an honor student, and she was barely twenty years old. Her father was a Holocaust survivor, and she believed that she was protesting fascism in America. She had heard about the riots the night before in downtown Kent City, But it sounded more like a drunken brawl than a protest. Today, she thought the protest would be more sober and peaceful, but if the police tried to stop them, she was prepared to go to jail. If she was going to be a liberated woman she had to learn it stand up to power, and someday when she was old, she would tell her granddaughters how she had taken on the man in the name of democracy. Before she left her room, she glanced in the mirror and wondered if she was really pretty, and she wondered if the boy who was sitting next to her in her literature class would be at the protest. He smiled at her, and she was a sucker for boys with blond hair and blue eyes. She knew that. She also wondered where she was going to eat that night. She felt like Chinese. An hour later, an M-1 rifle bullet that was designed to tear through a tree and kill Germans and Japs ripped through her body and tore up her wonder, and she laid dead in a pool of blood.
Willian Schroeder was nineteen, and he was an Eagle Scout who had won an Association of the United States Army Award in History. He was walking across campus to class wondering if he was going to win an ROTC office's training scholarship when he was hit in the back, the bullet passed through his vital organs exiting the other side leaving him bleeding to death with an expression of wonder on his face. What had happened to him? What did he miss? What didn't he know about his country, and what was Jeffrey Glen Miller saying when he was shot in the mouth. If you could read his lips, you would hear.
All the wonder of youth was gone. It had once existed between the lines where dreams were made and infinite possibilities dwelled, but now it was a place where nightmares roamed, and the message was clear. It was written in blood. The killing of James Rector at People's Park was no mistake. America had become a Greek tragedy where they were killing their own children and the Furies were loose.
In the next four days there were over a hundred campus demonstrations per day involving half the colleges and universities in the country and over four million students. Ohio, Kentucky, and South Carolina declared all campuses in a state of emergency, and the Nation Guard were called in twenty-four times at twenty-one universities in sixteen states. Five -hundred an thirty-six schools were completely shut down for extended period of time with fifty-one of them closing down for the school year. In the first week of May, thirty ROTC buildings on college campuses were burned or bombed at the rate of four a day; and by the end of the month, there were no fewer than one-hundred and sixty-nine incidents of bombings and arsons, ninety-five of them occurred on college campuses and another thirty-six targeted government and corporate buildings. At the peak of the uprising, there were over a million people was saw themselves as revolutionaries, and it was estimated that they were supported by as many as a fifth of the population, or approximately forty-million people. Then why couldn't we win?
The answer was clear to Sonny, but the answer was written in confusion. They had not got their message across to he vast majority of working class people in the country, and the generation gap had become a chasm that they had helped intensify by not developing a central vision that would bring the generations together and link the past with the future. They had not developed a clear vision of a workable and well thought out alternative economic and political system that would bring about a truly democratic society and support the nurture a quantum leap into the future that would be a model for all to follow. Sonny could see flashes of this vision, but he was only seeing the outer edges of the metaphors that he believed could become the star bursts of a new reality.
Sonny went back to his studies. He was convinced that he could find the answers, but was it too late? With the withdrawal from Vietnam, the movement had lost its momentum, and it was breaking up into its component parts like a kaleidoscope of broken dreams. The revolution was over. The dreams of millions of young Americans were stillborn, and what could have become an American cultural and political renaissance was dead, and the right wing counter-revolution had begun. He could see it in the money and the lobbyists pouring into Washington, the right wing think tanks and trade associations forming and the corporations merging and swallowing up all the information resources and means of communications creating the dream machine that churned out advertisements, movies, and TV shows glorifying greed and narcissism. The Leviathan was emerging as a complex of giant corporations that were transcending the nation-state and creating a world of corporate feudalism that would usher in a new Dark Age with Fortress America being the castle keep. So here he was at the beginning again trying to figure out what he had missed. What was the answer to the answer, man.
(Author's Note - That was then, but some of us didn't give up. Bernie never gave up, and many of us have since then dedicated our work to finding the answer to the answer man, that vision, that feeling of when we were we, and we were magic, That time is now. The answers are here, and as we come together our vision of the future will become clearer and clearer until it becomes a reality, and we are one again. But, beware, if the power elite decide that you are a significant threat to the system and none of the more subtle means of oppression work, it doesn't matter what color you are, they will beat you, and they will kill you. Power to the People.)
(The above is an excerpt from National Cash a novel by Marcello Tino)
Sample of National Cash - People's Park
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