Tin Soldiers

I should be using the abashed or chagrined fonts today, but they don't exist. A day that I believed I would remember forever came and went yesterday and I didn't note the date until I found a mention on line at someone's 'hopelessly liberal' website. Since my heart beats on the left side of my body, I tend to stop in on a regular basis but  I didn't get there until late in the day yesterday.

Yesterday was the 42nd anniversary of the murders at Kent State. Alison Krause. Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheur and William Schroeder died in a rain of bullets at the height of the (un)civil unrest over the United States' engagement in the War in Indochina. The link is from an essay two years ago that is probably a more intense read now than it was at the time, in light of the hardening of our political and ideological arteries as the contest for the White House this fall grows nearer.

The four who died were not the only students to die that spring. Less than two weeks later in Jackson, Mississippi, two more students, Philip Gibbs, a Junior at then-Jackson State College and James Green, still in high school as a senior were murdered as well for disagreeing about the conduct of a war half way around the world from them.

I was a year older than Green, a white child of some privilege in a prep school in The Oranges of New Jersey. Our class was less than a month away from finals-I was heading to Rutgers University that fall on a full academic scholarship and life was good except at dinnertime when the TV news arrived, usually with the main course on the table, and death and destruction were always on the menu.

I had, as had millions of other young men across America, registered for the draft, as required by law. I'd hedged my bets on the advice of older friends and had registered at the Selective Service office at 42 Banta Place in Hackensack. Four plus decades on I can still remember the address, and the reason for registering there.

The office in Hackensack served many of the tony towns, West Orange and Montclair among them but also the inner city of Newark where thousands of kids with no chance of anything close to the life that made me and my classmates unhappy would win at only one thing-the monthly pull of personnel as determined by the draft board. The Vietnam War had already become an action where blacks were sent by whites to kill Asians. The last people to figure that out were the white children who had life on a plate.

Color isn't and wasn't coincidental. The names of the (white) kids at Kent State I'll know until the day I die-but the identity of the two casualties at Jackson State, both black, I have to look up. And still I pretend I can't imagine why that is. Maybe four decades on, I should think of the first two weeks of May 1970 as about something more than a war fought faraway and think of the casualties continuing to pile up in our cities' streets every day and night. Strange how the more things change the more they remain the same.
-bill kenny