I attended Catholic seminary high school there, a tough industrial city that invented the vacuum cleaner and made Timken ball bearings, the home of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. In the decades since, Canton has become a hard-times Rust Belt city of foreclosures and high unemployment, a town of survivors who related in 2011 when a visiting Michelle Obama spoke about her blue-collar dad in Chicago. There in Canton, 40 miles south of the initial Kent State turmoil over the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, May 4, 1970 dawned during a sunny and quite optimistic time in my life.
My generation was young. Our senior class motto - "Let our Youth Enlighten the World" -unapologetically stated our status at the center of the intellectual and moral universe. Weeks earlier among those gently rolling hills of
northeastern Ohio, we had marked the first Earth Day. The title song of
the melancholy Beatles breakup album, “Let It Be,” filled our AM radios,
resonating with the April 10 split of the signature band of our Boom
generation. "Eight years of fantastic music!" I wrote in my
small red S.S. Kresge diary when I heard the announcement. In my dime-store journals, I had already recorded
1,200 days of the 1960s in America. I chronicled new Motown hits and pop songs,
scores of Detroit Tigers baseball games, the 1967 Detroit riots and the 1968
assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. My teen-age diaries
speak of rising body counts in Vietnam and marvel at Cape Canaveral space
launches and the race to the moon.
Today, living in faraway Sacramento, I still remember the
names of the Kent State dead: Jeff Miller of Plainview, N.Y., face down in a
parking lot with blood running from his body as a bewildered Florida
14-year-old runaway cried out in shock. I remember Sandy Scheuer, too,
of Youngstown, Ohio, Allison Krause of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Bill
Schroeder from Lorain, Ohio. They were barely older than me, then a month shy
of turning 18 as I was that day, and somewhere, I’m sure, families still grieve
for them. In June that same summer on our family farm near
Fremont in Northwest Ohio, I loaded hay wagons with a neighbor's son. He
was a farm boy, too, in his early 20s, a member of the Ohio National Guard
Reserve. He told me quite self-assuredly what many other Ohioans believed and
were sometimes willing to say aloud in those traumatic weeks that followed the
killings: “They should have shot a lot more.”
After graduation, it was easy and reflective of the time for many of us to flash
the two-fingered peace sign and glue peace symbols to our car windows. I felt
blessed to be alive in the sunshine, driving a tractor through my dad’s fields
on my 18th birthday,
singing a Ray Stevens hit, "Everything is Beautiful," above the engine noise and feeling what we called, in an era of rising
drug use, “high on life.” I really did believe that we, the young, would enlighten a
world that polluted, discriminated, believed in war and ignored poor people. I
was in love with feeling idealistic, intoxicated with a mission of a whole
generation to make the world a better place and dance to hit songs while doing
so.
I was still in that mood not long after graduation, driving
my parent's 1966 Plymouth station wagon in the nearby Seneca County seat of Tiffin. A city policeman
pulled me over. He asked me to step out of the car, then asked the
significance of a small U.S. flag decal glued - upside down - on the left rear
window. Sure enough, it was the iconic anti-war protest symbol, the upside down American
flag. I had short hair and looked nothing like a hippie. I was driving my
family’s station wagon. I told the cop the truth: Somebody else in the family did
it, apparently by accident. We removed it and he moved on.
It was a small youthful clash with authority in the real world of that time, where
“Support Your Local Police” was a bumper sticker and most working-class people
lacked time for moral superiority and high idealism from a college freshman.
These are old stories now. The years have brought countless instances of governments throughout the world
shooting their own people. What are four deaths in Ohio against mass government murder in Syria? What were they against 50,000 American kids who died in Vietnam? Still, I sometimes think that what happened in 1970 is one thread of the
defining narratives of our recent American history, part of the hardened,
unbending Boomer politics of students versus Guardsmen, freaks versus jocks,
Carter versus Reagan, Obama versus Romney and every kind of argument
about whether or not to invade Iraq or reform health care. The old tensions
remain.
My home state, Ohio, reaped what it can't undo, the angry chorus of a generational anthem by Neil Young: "Four Dead in
O-hi-o." I haven't heard the song in years. But everyone of a certain age remembers. Not long ago, attending a nephew's wedding near Kent, I
gazed upon that beautiful rolling Ohio countryside, alluring as
ever with its brilliant green lawns and leafy forests. For a brief moment, I
remembered it all, the four of them dead on the ground, part of an event long ago now in our personal and national history. I am remembering it this Veterans' Day weekend. Some things that happened just stay with you.
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