That's OK Mrrzy. I agree that forgetting May 4th would not be appropriate. It was just that I interpreted your words as a put down of my beautiful state and I may have overreacted. You must be much younger than me to not have heard about the massacre till the 80's. Of course, where I lived it was all anybody talked about, but it was also very much a national, if not international, story. The shootings themselves as well as subsequent events: 450 campuses shut down; 11 students bayonetted by guardsmen at New Mexico State; in NYC an extremely violent counter demonstration by Nixonite construction workers gained infamy as the Hard Hat Riot; 100,000 protesters in Washington DC became so raucous that Nixon was removed from the capital for his own protection; the murder of 2 unarmed students by police at Historical Black University, Jackson State. May, 1970 was the true turning point. Before then it was mostly draft aged kids and left wingers who were against the war. After that it became increasingly unpopular with the public at large, till it became unsustainable. Many of my parents generation even found a way to not support the war without compromising their conservativism. A line I remember hearing from many voices was: "We're not going all out to try to win this thing, so we might as well get out." After spending 6 years, 50,000 American lives, trillions in materiel and dropping more bombs on Hanoi than were dropped in all of WWII, I'm not sure what more they thought we should do. Nukes?!
The song "Sandy" is indeed moving, but once again let me point out that Sandy Scheuer was not part of the protests so she would not have run out with the other students nor did she "throw the stone at the men alone with their bayonets fixed for hire?" I don't like to harp on this, but I think it is very important that people understand that half of the casualties were just kids going to class as it attests to recklessness: of the university for not suspending classes that day and the guard for indiscriminately firing M1 rifles on a crowded campus during the busiest time of day. The song could very well have been called "Hey Alison" because the other young woman killed, Alison Krause, was very much a participant in the protests.
As bad as the Kent State shootings were they, could have been so much worse, bringing me to the story of the one true, if unsung, hero on campus that day, geology professor Glenn Frank. Immediately after the shootings you'd have expected the students to disperse but, instead, they massed for an all out assault on the guard, who were locked and loaded and had taken up firing position. Professor Frank placed himself between the National Guard and hundreds of furious students and with a borrowed megaphone exhorted the students for twenty minutes to not charge into the ranks of guardsmen. Eventually they did disperse and Prof Frank's own son, one of the protestors, later credited his father with saving hundreds of lives. When I listen to the recording of the event and hear the tears and fears and miserable desperation in his voice as he implores "I don't care whether you've never listened to anyone before in your lives. I am begging you right now. If you don't disperse right now, they're going to move in, and it can only be a slaughter. Would you please listen to me? Jesus Christ, I don't want to be a part of this", it simply rips my heart out.