Forty Years Ago Today: Four Dead in Ohio

Four innocent students were murdered by the Ohio National Guard on May 4, 1970 for simply being on campus at the wrong time. These were not fire breathing radicals. All indications were they were good kids going to Kent State University at the wrong time.

The town of Kent was a riot zone. The town was ransacked by opportunistic radical jerks who fed on the anger students felt because of President Richard Nixon's recent decision to escalate fighting in Vietnam including incursions into Cambodia. In a struggle that had already become a blood bath of American youth since 1966, American youth of draft age were refusing to offer themselves up to be human sacrifices in a senseless war of no strategic or national security interest to the United States where the United States government put its entire might behind a corrupt and unpopular South Vietnamese government.

In addition to the four Kent State students whose futures were snuffed out by an overly aggressive and poorly prepared National Guard Unit, over 58,000 young Americans would be killed, their lives destroyed in the jungles of a distant land. History clearly shows how wrong our government was. The so-called domino theory made it sound as though stakes were much higher than what was already essentially the case before our forces left South Vietnam. South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia would all become communist states but a monolithic communist movement sweeping across Asia never materialized. The North Vietnamese surely knew they wanted no part of the world's whore house in Thailand.

Today, although not free by our standards, Vietnam is a peaceful country struggling to become part of the world economy. The United States still hasn't gotten over Vietnam as the horrors of that war were so intense, we cannot commit to wars clearly in our strategic interest such as in Afghanistan and Iraq without some seeing those wars as being the same kind of mess Vietnam was.

Make no mistake about it, the Iraq war wound up being fought for less than what we thought was at stake as no major stockpiles or development programs of weapons of mass destruction were ever found. Regardless, we did discover plenty of abuses and horrors that surely justified the riddance of Saddam Hussein. Meanwhile, our ongoing efforts to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan, where safe sanctuary was provided for Al Qaeda to function freely, present our military with a dreadful challenge defending a corrupt government essentially installed by our government forces whose economy is maintained by the opium poppy trade. We cannot simply defeat the Taliban, we must help Afghanistan convert to a legitimate economy, and develop a political system they can believe in that will never pose a threat to the world.

What happened forty years ago in Kent, Ohio changed the world. What innocence our country still held was forever obliterated. Those in power had blood on their hands. Those blood stains will surely never fade as the memory of those four normal Americans guilty of going to college were executed for that offense.