Kent State At 50

Tragic and brutal.  I guess it took the murder of a handful of white college kids (Jackson State was an HBCU) to wake everyone up as to how fucked things really were.  RIP - your deaths were not in vain.

Barnstorm would be cool.  As for Crosby, how is he doing?  Before the pandemic hit, I heard him talking about how he needs to keep touring to keep his house, because he had lost his fortune and all his savings in his younger days on drugs.

You would think he gets enough royalty payments to maintain a half-decent lifestyle.

From I think 1972 to 1975, my school bus driver was one of the students shot--Donald "Scott" MacKenzie. He was the one shot who was farthest way and I remember he had a scar of his cheek that to me as a young kid look like an hour glass and I remember him telling my mother about the incident.  He was a great guy-handsome--he looked like Michael Lang--the cat that produced the Woodstock festival, used to where  a vest with no shirt that had the fringe on it like Neil Young's old jacket.  Funny what you remember.  Last I knew he taught drafting at like Montana State University.  As a kid growing up in Bucks County, the local paper would always run a "where are they now" story on the anniversary date and highlight what those that were shot were up too since.  Where ever you are Scott all these years later, may peace be with you.

Here is from an interview he did years ago:

Monday morning arrived, and just as Mackenzie, 22, was walking back from Franklin Hall around noon, he crossed the Commons trying to get back to where he lived.

Mackenzie was a Peace Marshal, trying to maintain peaceful demonstrations. He remembers that there was going to be a gathering of students and had plans to see what was going on in the middle of campus.

“I was definitely opposed to the war,” Mackenzie said. “Not a question about it.”

Mackenzie was up on the hill near the tennis courts observing the interactions of students and the National guard, as he witnessed them trying to disperse the crowd. He ran around the other side of Taylor Hill into the Prentice parking lot when the Guard came over the hill and into the practice field.

“I was the farthest one to get shot. I was almost two football fields away, so I kept my distance,” Mackenzie said. “When they did turn and start shooting, a lot of people were yelling, ‘They're only shooting blanks.’ I had turned and was running in a slow pace away from the Guard — like I said I was close to two football fields away — so I just turned and kind of was jogging along, and then that's when I got hit in the back of the neck.”

Mackenzie said he was knocked off his feet and remembers panicking as he had serious pain and was bleeding profusely as the bullet exited from the back of his neck to the front of his face.

A student came to his aid as he drove Mackenzie to the Health Center and was then taken to the hospital.  

Mackenzie graduated majoring in economics and minoring in political science and English literature. He has since visited Kent State’s campus for the annual commemorations. He currently resides in Colorado, where he is looking forward to retiring next year.

Being on campus does stir up a lot of emotions for Mackenzie.

“It’s bittersweet,” Mackenzie. “I mean the sweet part of it, if you want to call it sweet, is that I get to see people that I know and had been involved over the years and all the others that were shot and relatives and all that, so we got a good bond going on.”  

Mackenzie said May 4 was “a total overreaction with how it was handled with all of the people involved  — whether it be the state of Ohio, the National Guard and President Nixon, (Nixon’s Vice President Spiro) Agnew — they all were just making inflammatory statements that kind of set the stage for something like this to happen with the rhetoric that they were espousing.”

how come they don't shoot conservative protestors?

I lived 30 miles away and was 10 years old. What a time 68-70 in the peace movement and civil liberties advances. At ten some things like Detroit and LA on fire leave pretty big footprints. Kent is a huge footprint on my life. Kent was a hot spot for anti war activity, the students I believe had taken control of two buildings with sit ins. I remembered and me and my mother in the kitchen and there was a break in on her Tradio, or Talk show program, for a news bulletin. "If you have children at Kent State get them home now, shots have been fired". 

in high school we went up for a weekend to protest the stopping of the building of the new gym on the grounds of the shooting. People had taken over the grounds and were camping on site in what became known as tent city. Tent City was a long drawn out protest that ended with the remaining couple of hundred inhabitants of tent city being arrested and a new gym was built. I later attend Kent for a short time, but hung out there for a few years, great little college town.

Conservative protester

"this tea is too tepid"

>>>>how come they don't shoot conservative protestors?

By and large, armed white guys get a pass to do shit black, Indian, or Latino armed guys would never ever get away with doing.   Probably has something to do with the fact that the cops are by and large also white conservative guys.  But just for the record, Bill Clinton's DOJ was reviled by the right wingers as being jack booted thugs for burning up little kids and shooting a woman in the doorway of her cabin with her baby in her arms.   Old LaVoy Finicum might also take issue with that statement (but he's dead).

I lived just south of Eureka (high up on Humboldt Hill) and I guess we had a TV because I remember seeing it on the news, though maybe it was the next day on someone else's TV. It was so fucking disturbing, frightening, so sad, so infuriating... one of those things from which we've never recovered, even from afar.

Sharing Steve Silberman's FB post concerning the 50th year since the murders of 4 Kent State students by government troops.

"50 years ago today, 4 students at Kent State were shot and killed by National Guardsmen for protesting the war in Vietnam. David Crosby showed a Life magazine article about the killings to his bandmate Neil Young, who wrote a song about it. "Ohio" was recorded, rushed into production, and came out in June - the equivalent of Internet speed at the time. In 2017, my good buddy Phil Weisshaar and I saw Crosby perform the song at Kent State. Here it is."

https://youtu.be/_c5wEOMeQCk

...

I always considered RFK's assassination the end of the dream. Upon further review, this was it.

Love Lies Bleeding

This united parents with their kids again and was a major part of the down fall of Nixon imo. I think this opened the eyes of the parents to the uselessness of the war in Vietnam 

On This Date 1970

Nixon made a surprise impromptu pre-dawn visit to the Lincoln Memorial where he chatted with a group of protesters sitting on the Memorial steps after the previous days protests against the war and the recent Kent State shootings. Un fuckin real. I can't even imagine it.

The Night Nixon Hung Out With Hippies at the Lincoln Memorial
https://www.washingtonian.com/2016/05/17/richard-nixon-kent-state-protes...