40 years ago (4 dead in Ohio) and today.

40 years ago today (May 4) I was 10 years old, sitting at home, when I heard about something I thought unthinkable that had just happened about 40 miles away from my home. National guard troops had fired on unarmed students at Kent State protesting the Vietnam War, killing 4 and wounding another 9. Nine days later at Jackson State, police killed students and wounded another 12 who were protesting the war and the killings at Kent State.

It was inconceivable to me that unarmed students exercising their First Amendment rights had been shot to death in the United States,  but my childhood was filled with nightmares of that sort. In 1967 I remember driving through parts of Cleveland that were under military occupation as a result of just one U.S. city among hundreds that had had exploded that year and the previous one. And, of course, in 1968, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated in little more than 2 months, disappearing the 2 most prominent voices calling for the U.S. to pull its troops out of Vietnam.

And, of course, we were all at the time convinced of the inevitability of nuclear holocaust.

So I laugh when I hear earnest students of mine who insist that terrorism is the greatest threat this country has ever faced. And when conservatives express the fear that President Obama threatens us with fascism. We should not be fighting wars we can’t win in support of corrupt regimes. And we have huge problems at home:

In 2005, 21.2 percent of U.S. national income accrued to just 1 percent of earners. Contrast 1968, when the CEO of General Motors took home, in pay and benefits, about sixty-six times the amount paid to a typical GM worker. Today the CEO of Wal-Mart earns nine hundred times the wages of his average employee. Indeed, the wealth of the Wal-Mart founder’s family in 2005 was estimated at about the same ($90 billion) as that of the bottom 40 percent of the U.S. population: 120 million people.

But I remember vividly how sad I was on May 4, 1970.

We have lost too, too much. Don’t let history disappear.

I am not sure at all that my students understood that Wednesday morning last November that we were living in an extraordinary historical moment, that I could not have imagined growing up that a black would be elected President.  I try too to explain to my son how horrific a year 1968 was to me as a boy of almost 9.  41 years ago tomorrow Martin Luther King was killed.  Two months before King’s assassination, the Viet Cong began the Tet Offensive, which made plain to to most Americans that winning the Vietnam War would require more resolve than it was worth. Less than one month after King’s assasination, a combination of a nationwide workers’ strike and student uprisings led to street fighting in Paris that verged on genuine revolution.  One month after that  Bobby Kennedy was shot dead just moments after winning the Democratic primary in California, thereby appearing to have gained the electoral momentum to get the party’s nomination and, I think likely, to be elected President on a strong anti-war platform.  But the Democrats imploded later during their convention in Chicago, where Mayor Daly loosed his police force on anti-war protestors, whom the cops outnumbered 5 to 1.  In August, Soviet tanks rolled into Prague and crushed the brief brigtht moment known as the Prague Spring, a moment that the SolVidarity uprising 21 years later in Gdansk echoed, an echo that made anyone who remembered 1968 skeptical that 1989 would be any different.  In November of 1968 Richard Nixon was elected President, which resulted in an escalation and expansion of the war in Southeast Asia (and the straight line from there to the Khmer Rouge’s genocide in Cambodia) and an administration which used its governmental powers to silence people it explicitly identified as its “enemies” and engaged in criminal enterprises to ensure it would remain in power. It was a very scary time.  Today is no golden age, but it’s much, much better than 1968.  We need to remember that.  And, believe it or not, historical memory is an important issue in arguments over the rights of copyright holders to control the use of their works.

U.S.A. Post-Election Music Break — Nina Simone, “Feeling Good.” And Aeschylus: “He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”