Tin sol­diers and Nixon com­ing,
We’re finally on our own.
This sum­mer I hear the drum­ming,
Four dead in Ohio.

— Neil Young, “Ohio”

Go watch the video. I’ll wait.

Yes­ter­day marked the forty-​​second anniver­sary of the Kent State Mas­sacre. I feel a very per­sonal tie to this event, whether deservedly or not. Let me tell you my thoughts.

It was a dif­fer­ent time. Rocked by racial ten­sions, Amer­ica seem­ingly could not extract itself from a bloody, unpop­u­lar, and unnec­es­sary war. Protests on our col­lege cam­puses, and riots in the streets of our cities con­trasted with an explo­sion of artis­tic expres­sion and new-​​found sex­ual free­dom. The assas­si­na­tions of Bobby Kennedy and Mar­tin Luther King still burned like open wounds. (more…)