Amergin,

I'm a little put off by the sarcasm--but forget it for now. Don't confuse my comments with a denial of the facts or the tragedy. I spent a good deal of my life living in Kent and attending the school. I got to hear the many sides of the story and got to know some of the survivors and the people of the town and the college pretty well. It may be vanity but I think I came away with some insights that have a certain amount of truth to them.

The principal insight is that there are two May 4th's. The mythological and romantic and the actual. I've always felt that the former has served to keep people from fully understanding the latter.

No matter how sympathetic you try to be to the guardsmen, to portray them as all having behaved the same, as uniformed automatons that just turned and fired on students is part of the myth. Most of them missed on purpose. The decision not to aim--to fire a warning shot instead, required an individual moral choice that must be acknowleged. To simply portray the guardsmen as poor dumb unthinking killers, no matter how sympathetically done, is wrong.