Kent State moment
May. 4th, 2010 04:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bex77If I say "Kent State Shootings" do people know what I am talking about? I know it was before almost everyone on my f-list was born, so I don't want to assume.
It's hard for me to believe that it was 40 years ago today. And in another way, it seems part of a world so far away now. Maybe working on a university campus makes it more relevant to my life. I just read the Wikipedia article about it. Still a lot of "we don't know." I thought by now someone would have figured out what really happened.
I don't remember the event itself, but I do remember that summer. We were visiting my grandparents' tobacco farm in North Carolina, and my redneck Air National Guardsman uncle kicked my liberal pacifist Yankee New Yorker dad out of his house for saying that the Guardsmen in Ohio should not have shot those students, and that the war in Vietnam wasn't a good idea. *sigh*
It did have a big influence on musicians. People are posting Crosby, Still, Nash and Young's "Ohio" on Facebook today. There are twenty-five entries in the Wikipedia article with musical references to the event, from Holly Near to Genesis.
Odd musical fact - both Chrissie Hind (later of the Pretenders) and two guys who founded the band Devo were students at Kent State and there for the protest. Wikipedia says "Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale, founding members of Devo, also attended Kent State at the time of the shootings. Casale was reportedly "standing about 15 feet (4.6 m) away" from Allison Krause when she was shot, and was friends with her and another one of the students who were killed. The shootings were the transformative moment for the band, which became less of a pure joke and more a vehicle for social critique (albeit with a blackly humorous bent)."
It's hard for me to believe that it was 40 years ago today. And in another way, it seems part of a world so far away now. Maybe working on a university campus makes it more relevant to my life. I just read the Wikipedia article about it. Still a lot of "we don't know." I thought by now someone would have figured out what really happened.
I don't remember the event itself, but I do remember that summer. We were visiting my grandparents' tobacco farm in North Carolina, and my redneck Air National Guardsman uncle kicked my liberal pacifist Yankee New Yorker dad out of his house for saying that the Guardsmen in Ohio should not have shot those students, and that the war in Vietnam wasn't a good idea. *sigh*
It did have a big influence on musicians. People are posting Crosby, Still, Nash and Young's "Ohio" on Facebook today. There are twenty-five entries in the Wikipedia article with musical references to the event, from Holly Near to Genesis.
Odd musical fact - both Chrissie Hind (later of the Pretenders) and two guys who founded the band Devo were students at Kent State and there for the protest. Wikipedia says "Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale, founding members of Devo, also attended Kent State at the time of the shootings. Casale was reportedly "standing about 15 feet (4.6 m) away" from Allison Krause when she was shot, and was friends with her and another one of the students who were killed. The shootings were the transformative moment for the band, which became less of a pure joke and more a vehicle for social critique (albeit with a blackly humorous bent)."
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Date: 2010-05-04 08:43 pm (UTC)Ohio is an amazing song. I'm always surprised when people have no idea what it's referencing.