May 4, 1970

I have been alive for the last 40 years due to a fluke of history. The kid lying dead in this picture, shot by the Ohio National Guard on the campus of Kent State University, could have been me.

His crime was to appear in public to oppose the Vietnam war, which still had five years to run and eventually would kill two to three million Vietnamese, mostly civilians, and 55,000 U.S. soldiers. The spillover war in Cambodia would add more untold hundreds of thousands as perhaps one-third of that country’s inhabitants were slaughtered by the demented Maoists who seized power there.

What was achieved by this endless carnage? A communist government took control of South Vietnam, unified the country and now does business with capitalist clothing manufacturers to produce pullovers. (I wear some.) Tourism is booming, and no one worries about whether the Vietnamese are building atomic weapons, getting too friendly with the Taliban or promoting Marxist revolution in Burma (which would be a decided improvement there in any case).

What ever happened to the youthful distaste for pointless warfare and militarism that we celebrated then? Why do passers-by in the Atlanta airport feel the need to applaud as automatic heroes the line of troops in camouflage filing past them without a second thought as to what those kids might be told to do with their weapons and to whom?

Who paid for the decision to continue this destruction and waste of life and resources any and everywhere at any time, whenever a president determines we should, based on whatever feeble lies he needs at the moment? Where is the soul-searching about the use of American firepower on either practical or moral terms? Why do Henry Kissinger and John McCain get to parade around triumphantly or even brag about what they did there instead of keeping a prudent silence about their role in a frankly criminal enterprise and world-historic debacle?

The photo above reflected the consternation of those times, how unimaginable it was that National Guard reservists would fire on their own children. We soon learned better. That summer, visiting my home town in Ohio, we were doubly shocked to hear many of the townspeople applaud the action—essentially saying that they wished we were dead. They proceeded to re-elect Richard Nixon, who had pumped up the hatred of us peacenik youth, in a landslide two years later.

We didn’t give them the satisfaction of disappearing, but their view of war and conquest has gradually erased the memory of that generational rebellion with help from Meryl Streep (The Deer Hunter), scores of angst-ridden Vietnam memoirs focused on our suffering troops (their victims appear only in the background), historical rewrites, a decade of intervention in Central America on the side of neo-nazi nun-murderers to protect Texas from red Latinos, Reaganite triumphalism and permission to ‘feel good about America’, and probably a half-dozen other influences I haven’t thought of.

Now, it’s pure fantasy to imagine hordes of youth heading into the streets to denounce American war-making in remote corners of the world or to question the virtue of our military machinery—or even how much of our shrinking treasure it absorbs. Even our Nobel-peace-prize winning president has the revolting tastelessness to joke with the sycophant press about predator drones, like the ones he has sent to annihilate the families of his enemies halfway around the world since his first days in office.

The times shown in this photo were different: we thought about non-American populations and what life was like from their perspective. We shuddered at rampant destruction and questioned the practice of raining death upon defenseless civilians.

Now, instead, after experiencing arbitrary slaughter on our own soil one September 11th, nothing matters but revenge.