If you remember the date, you are probably old enough to forget it. It’s been 54 years. Brains age. Events fade into the past. Life gets more and more complicated and clear moral choices turn into muddy moral dilemmas.

May 4, 1970 was the day that Ohio National Guardsmen, reacting to a protest against Richard Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia, killed 4 students and wounded 9 more. The students were unarmed, save for rocks and bottles that they threw at anyone in uniform. The Ohio guardsmen were armed, inexperienced, and scared.

The killings intensified a protest movement already brought to violence by previous escalations of the Vietnam War, by the My Lai massacre of Vietnamese villagers, and by Nixon’s cancellation of the student draft deferment. This latter decision ended a “poor kids go to Vietnam, rich kids go to college” situation among the nation’s 18- to 22-year-olds.

College students, in particular, found it upsetting.

On May Day, a nationwide student strike was announced by student organizations. The Kent State ROTC building was burned to the ground on May 2, with demonstrators interfering with firefighters. By May 3, attempts by the Kent State administration to confine students to their dorms degenerated into guardsmen wounding several students with bayonets.

Anyone not expecting the murder of unarmed people—most of the protestors, as it happened—was under the illusion that America would not use lethal force against its own children. Given what was happening to the poor kids America sent to Vietnam, they should have known better.

As moral choices go, the one that faced James Rhodes, then the Ohio governor, wasn’t all that difficult. You don’t send armed troops against unarmed demonstrators. But he did, and students were killed, and the eight guardsmen charged with violation of civil rights were acquitted. Morality turned out not to be a deciding factor.

All over the country, young people were fighting against the military, the class structure, and the people who continued business as usual when other, less fortunate people were dying. People in authority were lining up to scatter their demonstrations, destroy their moral positions, and kill them if necessary. The protests had exposed a deep moral division in American politics, between young and old, authoritarian and progressive, black and white, rich and poor, rigid thinkers and those capable of nuance.

More massacres were expected, and, indeed, on May 15, white police shot black students at Jackson State College in Mississippi, killing 2 and wounding 12 more.

President Nixon, probably because he could see things were getting out of hand, acted to discourage local authorities from any more murderous confrontations. His actions probably prevented a great many more killings, but it was still a civil war with plenty of deaths, and these days we know who won.

________

A half-century allows for the development of irony, which requires the dredging up of events that have more to teach us than we thought they had when they happened.

The reason Kent State came to my mind after all these years wasn’t the many pro-Palestinian demonstrations on American college campuses. Instead, it was a long-forgotten anecdote: in the weeks before guardsmen were called to Kent State, the University’s chapter of Students for a Democratic Society announced an anti-war event where they would napalm a dog.

This plan got as much national attention as the napalming of human beings in Vietnam, although it turned out to be a rhetorical device designed to get students to a teach-in on the effects of napalm on human beings. No dog was harmed, but the incident was used after the fact by people justifying the Kent State shootings.

The irony appeared this year when South Dakota governor Kristi Noem published her memoir, which contains her account of shooting an uncontrollable 14-month-old chicken-killing dog and a “nasty and mean” old goat. Anyone who grew up on a farm or ranch is familiar with having to kill livestock, but Noem was clueless—in a way the Kent State SDS wasn’t—about the public shock value of deliberately killing a helpless animal, mean and nasty or not, chicken-killing or not. The story probably cost her the vice-presidential nomination in a presidential election where the winner (take your pick) has a better-than-average chance of dying. 

The incident brings up the old ethics class dilemma where you have to choose between running a streetcar over five ordinary people or running over a Nobel Peace Prize winner carrying a puppy. Whose life is worth more? In America, from the looks of things, it’s the Nobel Prize winner, but only if he or she has the dog.

We might want to look at the qualities that cause us to value canine life. We might want to look for those same qualities in human beings.

________

On May 4, 1970, I was a 19-year-old transfer student at Harvard University, which had been the scene of violent antiwar demonstrations that spring and the one before. As a work-study student in the University’s Widener Library, I had guarded the doors from student demonstrators who had called for it to be burned down. I was also dangerously close to flunking out, because I had multiple papers due, a bunch of approaching exams I hadn’t studied for, and recent memories of nightstick-wielding Cambridge cops, in formation, marching down Massachusetts Avenue, steadily pushing back rock-throwing demonstrators. Instead of reading textbooks I was sitting on the 4th floor of Adams House, watching people beat other people up.

My parents, who hadn’t wanted me to go to Harvard in the first place, called and told me to come home before the shooting started. When I told them my biggest worry was losing my draft deferment because of my grades, they said there were worse things in the world. They were probably wrong, but they saw Vietnam as a safer place than Cambridge.

Harvard’s administration, having been burned the previous spring by a decision to call in the cops to clear an occupied campus building, cancelled classes and finals and papers for the rest of the year. All grades in all classes were listed as P for pass. Everyone was told to go home and enjoy the summer.

A day later I was on a plane to Idaho, and the day after that I was on the beach at Lake Lowell, a tepid reservoir thirty miles west of Boise, visiting the College of Idaho, the college I had transferred from. I was at the College’s Spring Fling, drinking beer and listening to a garage band play Sympathy for the Devil. The College of Idaho didn’t have an SDS chapter. Instead it had a bunch of pre-law and pre-med students who couldn’t think of demonstrating against the war because it might jeopardize their chances for professional school and a middle-class existence with a spouse and children. No classes, exams, or papers had been cancelled at the College of Idaho.

I made sure to tell my former classmates that no failing grades hung over my Spring Fling.

Only later, once I had graduated from Harvard, did I realize my education was woefully incomplete. Harvard, used to being on the right side of social justice issues, had gone through the institutional equivalent of a nervous breakdown. The Harvard faculty, used to being advisors to presidents and arbitrators of ethics, had contributed the demonic Henry Kissinger to the Nixon administration. A great many professors, experiencing guilt by association, lost their tenured arrogance and even their faith in their own moral judgment.

In retrospect, that breakdown made for a better education than I would have received in less turbulent times. But due to the cancellation of semesters and the relaxation of standards, I had hard evidence that a diploma didn’t mean you were educated. It took my 20s to fill the obvious gaps in my knowledge, and my 30s to my 70s to realize that my education would continue until I died, and even then it would still be full of holes.

That was what Kent State did for me, and for thousands of others who signed up for a college education thinking it was a known quantity. It wasn’t worth the price Kent State demanded.

________

Currently, demonstrations and occupations are threatening finals and graduations across the country. Students are protesting the deaths of thousands of Palestinians and Jews, a good percentage of them children. Ironies abound, not least among them the American politicians of both parties who criticize Kristi Noem for killing a poorly-trained dog but who refuse to attach prohibitions on war crimes to military aid to Israel.

As I write, the International Criminal Court, which has not lost faith in its own moral judgment, is likely to charge Bibi Netanyahu with war crimes and issue a warrant for his arrest. I doubt if Netanyahu will end his days like Slobodan Milosevic, but it’s possible. In any event, the Gaza war adds to the irony of Israel finding any part of its identity in the Holocaust.

As I have noted before, once the children start dying, the god being worshipped is neither Jehovah nor Allah. Moloch is the name, and dead kids are his game. Hamas and Israel are in the same pew in the church of Moloch. Vladimir Putin sits between them. The reasons for our current wars are less appalling than the results.

The Gaza War, like the Ukraine War, is an occasion for outrage. Moral choices aren’t that complicated in the face of genocide, and the people who prosecute a genocidal war—no matter what they think they’re doing—are trying to kill something deep in themselves. In Gaza, these people are on both sides. The only moral choice they can make is to stop.

However, if the 50-year class report that Harvard sent me last year is prophetic, the outrage won’t last long. A good percentage of my fellow students who demonstrated in the Yard and fought cops in Harvard Square ended up as physicians and attorneys and professors, as ensconced in the power structure as it’s possible to be and still draw a line between themselves and, say, Robert McNamara or LBJ or Kissinger or Nixon. It helps that those unindicted war criminals are mostly forgotten, along with their deeds. Where once they inspired blind rage, they now inspire more pleasant memories of a most fortunate time of life, of drunken mixers at Wellesley, low-budget dates at Elsie’s on Mt. Auburn Street, victories over Yale, graduation speeches by Nobel winners and their service dogs if they have any.

The student demonstrators camping and marching on university campuses right now should realize that they can and statistically will end up as a kind of bourgeois lumpenproletariat, a drag on social justice, one that has put away childish passions and simply focused on getting to the top of its many well-paid professions.

They should also realize that a college campus might be a handy place to stage a demonstration and signal any number of virtues, but it’s too small an arena to have much positive impact on national policy. If they really want to change the world, they should work against the election of damaged, vindictive moral defectives who commit war crimes in a vain attempt to fill the holes in their own souls.

I hope no student dies this spring. Dying is about the worst thing you can do to your parents.

I hope these students, on their American campuses, pack up their tents and go back to their classes and graduate. Then I hope they spend their lives achieving power and using it where it will do some good.

I hope they remember every injustice, every outrage committed by every faction and every tribe. I hope they work toward a world where empathy and peacemaking don’t give way to authoritarian guns and nightsticks, artillery and bombs, and where moral clarity doesn’t give way to expediency.

I hope they never forget their anger until the reasons for that anger go away.