A 45-Year Memory: Four Dead in Ohio

The Kent State shootings ... occurred at Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, and involved the shooting of unarmed college students by the Ohio National Guard on Monday, May 4, 1970. The guardsmen fired 67 rounds over a period of 13 seconds, killing four students and wounding nine others, one of whom suffered permanent paralysis.

Some of the students who were shot had been protesting the Cambodian Campaign, which President Richard Nixon announced during a television address on April 30. Other students who were shot had been walking nearby or observing the protest from a distance.

There was a significant national response to the shootings: hundreds of universities, colleges, and high schools closed throughout the United States due to a student strike of four million students, and the event further affected public opinion—at an already socially contentious time—over the role of the United States in the Vietnam War.
-Wikipedia

I was a senior in college and didn't know what to think. Sadly, it wasn't the last time I was faced with the cognitive dissonance of watching what I thought were sacred values and the foundation of who we are as a nation be undermined.

Michael Winship, the Emmy Award-winning senior writer of Moyers & Company and BillMoyers.com,
has posted an essay he wrote five years ago on the 40th anniversary of Kent State.
It brings back the memories.

Link to Bill Moyers.com