Tin soldiers and Nixon coming …

On There are places I remember …:

rrgirl wrote: May 4, 1970 was the first time I’d ever heard of Kent. with one brother volunteering to serve in Viet Nam, and another brother ready to leave for Canada if his draft number came up, the shootings were an expression of the differences of opinion within my own family, not to mention the generation gap. no place felt safe.
a few years later I was spending most of my days and a lot of nights overlooking the site where the riots and shootings took place. parked my car in the parking lot where kids died, walked past the steel sculpture with the bullet holes, past the bell, the precast pagoda, the oak tree on blanket hill. it wasn’t a good place to learn what had happened - too much shouting, too many personal agendas woven into the politics.

it seems its still that way. then and now, the only thing I’m sure of is the saddness of it all.

And Andy commented quite recently: I am currently a student at Kent State University. The whole May 4th ordeal is very significant to me. I walk through the May 4th Monument on a daily basis and not a day goes by without me thinking about what it was like to have lived through it. I have lacrosse practice on the commons. I see trees that have bullet holes in them. That hits hard and I realize the significance that that date in history truly has. It’s very sad.

I probably would have remembered the anniversary even if Andy’s comment hadn’t reminded me of the post I made on Kent State last year. Kent State is something that happened when I was growing up and it’s something that I will always remember.

I didn’t see anything in the news today on the Kent State shootings. 2008 marks the 38th anniversary. It’s not one of those “prominent” anniversaries, like the 10th or 25th or 50th. It will be interesting to see if the event is remembered in 2010, the 40th anniversary.

I was rather miffed last November at the lack of news or comment on the anniversary of JFK’s assassination. And last month I didn’t see much of anything on the Oklahoma City bombing (19 April 1995), the shootings at Columbine High School (20 April 1999), or the Virginia Tech shootings (16 April 2007). How quick we forget. Or do we bother remembering at all?

Perhaps our recollection of history is clouded by a degree of Me-ism: If it didn’t happen to me, then it’s not that important. People are detached from things that happen outside their little worlds. Hence a sense of disconnect from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for Americans who don’t have a loved one serving in the military.

Every day is a Remembrance Day in one way or another, if people would just remember to look beyond themselves.