CSNY - Ohio

Don't do a lot of politics here even though most of the contributers are political animals in the extreme.

40 years ago today 4 students were shot to death on the campus of Kent State. I remember it even though I was not yet nine years old. In the span of four days I went from a child who found Nixon's address to the nation about bombing Cambodia annoying because it pre-empted my TV viewing to an acutely aware (and genuinely frightened) boy. It stands out as the very first moment in my life when I sensed things in the world were mighty fucked up. It didn't help that the now iconic image of the event featured the dead body of Jeffrey Miller and a wailing Mary Ann Vechio, who at age 14 was a mere five years older than I at the time.

CSNY released the single within weeks of the incident, capitalizing on and profiting from the tragedy. Regardless of their motives, they created an anthem that stands as testament to that moment.

Later that same year the writer Harlan Ellison dedicated a book to the victims. A couple of years later he wrote another book, appropriately titled "Approaching Oblivion", which included this forward...

In Alone Against Tomorrow, I had included as a dedication for a book of stories about alienation, these words:

This book is dedicated to
the memory of
EVELYN DEL REY,
a dear friend, for laughter
and for caring . . .

And to the memories of:
ALLISON KRAUSE
JEFFREY GLEN MILLER
WILLIAM K. SCHROEDER
SANDRA LEE SHEUER

four Kent State University
students senselessly murdered
in their society's final act of
alienation.

The list is incomplete. There are
many others. There will be more.


And among the letters I received on that book, was this one, reproduced exactly as I received it:


June 10, 1971

Dear Mr. Ellison,

For your dedication of Alone Against Tomorrow, you mention the "four Kent State University students senselessly murdered . . ." Please be informed that these hooligans were Communist-led radical revolutionaries and anarchists, and deserved to be shot, whether by a firing squad or by the National Guard.

Your remarks ruined an otherwise good book. Nevertheless, I am happy for the opportunity to correct your thinking.

Sincerely yours,

-------------

I receive a lot of mail these days. Time prevents my answering very much of it—if I did, I'd have no time for writing the stories that prompt the mail in the first place. Some of the mail is pure, hardcore nutso. I roundfile it and forget it. More of it is reasoned, entertaining, supportive or chiding in a rational tone, and I read it and consider what's been said and usually reply with a form letter I've had to devise simply as a matter of survival.

Occasionally I get a letter that gives me pause. Mr. Chambers's letter was one of those. If I didn't know purely on instinct that he was running off jingo phrases that he'd swallowed whole, if I didn't know he was wrong purely on gut instinct or by my association with student movements for ten and more years, the reopening of the Kent State Massacre case by the Attorney General would convince me. So it's too easy merely to disregard a letter like that, and say, "What an asshole." But consider the letter. It isn't illiterate, it isn't rancorous, it isn't redneck or written on toilet paper. It is a simple, polite, straightforward attempt to straighten out what the correspondent takes to be incorrect thinking on my part. One cannot dismiss this kind of letter. It is from an ordinary human being, speaking about extraordinary events, and genuinely believing what he writes. Chambers really does believe those poor, innocent kids were Communist tools who deserved to die.

Now that scares the piss out of me.

Things haven't changed much in four decades.



as a side note:
Devo members Jerry Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh were Kent State students at the time. Casale witnessed the shootings and two of the dead were his friends. According to one report, it was at the moment he saw the M1 exit wounds in Allison Krause's body that Casale decided his previously tongue-in-cheek de-evolution idea was very serious indeed.
Devo covered "Ohio" in 2002.