Your Email:

Subject:

Message:
Entry: Remembering Kent State: The President as Street Thug Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/kent_state_the_president_as_street_thug#1424 Post contents: The truly sad thing about the Kent State massacre is that you had draft dodgers on both sides of the dispute. It normally required considerable political clout to get into the National Guard and Reserves in those days. Miraculously, children of the elite like Richie Daley in Chicago, and George W. Bush of Kennebunkport, wound up in the Marine Reserves and the Air National Guard, respectively. I always have thought that Dan Quayle got a bum rap. With his family's status he probably had to beg and scream to even get into the National Guard. If he had actually gotten into the infantry, like so many of the rest of us, this would have threatened the entire system of exempting the sons of the elite from combat service. The elite were largely ignored, or put into safe places, the rest of us traded our blue collars for green ones. It is not true that the New Left and the 1960s anti-war movement were all leftist. I was involved in the anti-war movement, then after being drafted by the minions of Lyndon Johnson, I was shipped over to Viet Nam by that Great Leader and proto-neocon Tricky Dick Nixon. As I remember, I was hardly the only one in my little recon/heavy weapons infantry unit to have been involved in anti-war activities. Many of us continued in these after escaping from military servitude. In my junior college days, our Veterans Club held a peace rally. If you really think about it clearly, the Kent State incident was bungled by inexperienced and frightened troops. Had they been experienced, the casualty count among the demonstrators would have been far higher. The appropriate way to handle a mob scene like that would be to fix bayonets and charge. If you see anyone with a gun on the way while charging the mob, you shoot them, not a bunch of fools in their midst. (In defense of the troops, it is truly foolish to mess with armed soldiers.) Such a charge would have dispersed the mob, and most likely the only casualties would have been people tripping and falling on one side or the other. Sent at: 2008 09 05