1970. I lived in a small mountain town in California. My parents were aware, liberal and the alternative radio station KPFA was often heard in our house. But it still was a small mountain town and my political awakening was as learning from a far off country (perhaps like the Ukraine is a far off country today). I was 12 in 1968 and remember the devastating assassinations of King and Kennedy, and realized that the „establishment“ had little tolerance for people who thought as I with the footage of police brutality during the Democratic convention (often called the Chicago Riots but who was rioting?) When I was interviewed for a Veterans of Foreign Wars stipendium – 1973 – they asked me if I would fight for my country and I cautiously answered that if my country was invaded I would probably fight to defend it (a feeling that I recently – in the first days of the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, when the idea that Russia could move on to invade yet other countries was no longer unthinkable – had to look at again). The interviewer warned me that „some of the teachers at the high school were Communists“ – I wryly thought that he was probably thinking about my dad and my favorite teachers. I didn’t get the stipendium.
In the middle of this the Kent State Massacre. If it wasn’t yet clear that our government would fire upon and kill it’s own people… it was now. I think that the shock of this event was perhaps one of the catalysts, one of the pivotal moments, that led to the ultimate withdrawal of the US troops from Vietnam about three years later.
The people demonstrating were perhaps four or five years older than me. I was still too young at 14 to actively take part in the demonstrations happening down the Hill and across the state in Berkeley. By the time I turned 18 they were no longer drafting young men into the military. Police brutality got slightly readjusted and there was no more shooting into protesting crowds with live ammunition (just horses and rubber bullets and tear gas). Remaining were racial profiling and the ever present „incidents“ of black men or women „resisting“ and being shot or suffocated).
All over the world there are still countries shooting into crowds of their own citizens.
When will it end?
