Tuesday marked the 40th anniversary of the Kent State Massacre, and Jeff Kisseloff, author of Generation on Fire: Voices of Protest from the 1960s, An Oral History remembered it on his fantastic blog, The Kisseloff Collection.
Forty years ago today, four students at Kent State University — Allison Krause, Jeff Miller, Sandy Scheuer and William Schroeder — were murdered by agents of the US government… In 2007, I wrote a book called Generation on Fire in response to Kent State, but primarily as a tribute to the remarkable courage and rebellious spirit that sparked so many of the great changes that came out of the 1960s, The last chapter was devoted to the memory of Allison Krause, as told by her boyfriend, Barry Levine, and her mother Doris while I cried into my tape recorder. Here is a PDF of the chapter. Feel free to pass it around. I posted a few more pictures on the book's Web site here.
It's been forty years but I'm still very pissed off about Kent State and Richard Fucking Nixon and the cowards who fired those deadly bullets but who still get to drink their beers and sun their big bellies in their backyards while four kids who had been looking forward to long, happy lives, are instead in the ground, their families still devastated.
We don't know who you are, but you do. I hope that every moment of contentment you've had since that afternoon has been offset by misery and guilt. I wonder whether some time today you'll pause to think with regret about the lives you destroyed. But I doubt it. After all, they shoot students, don't they?
