We’re All Here Together: Black, White, Red, Yellow & Brown
A Car with a Shattered Window and Bullet Holes in the Driver’s Door at a Crime Scene
In May of 1964 the United States was engaged in a very unpopular war in Southeast Asia. Thousands of young men were sent to the humid jungles of far-away Vietnam and Laos to defend that little corner of the world from the scourge of falling communist dominoes. On the campus of Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, there was a different kind of collapse. The lifeless bodies of four university students dropped to ground under a fusillade of 67 bullets from National Guard troops who had been given the green light to fire - and that permission ended in the death of those young Vietnam anti-war protesters and the wounding of nine others.
All on the campus of a leafy college in Middle America.
The death of four innocent white college students on May 4th, 1970, was a momentous day in US history. The Vietnam conflict was never perceived the same way from that afternoon forward.
A national lesson, it seems, was administered by fate itself, as to how difficult it is for a country to engage in an unpopular, if not hated war, despite the justifications of politicians – old men mostly – who are eager to send fuzzy-cheeked boys off to a rugged, dangerous battlefield in a foreign land, to fight in a great noble cause that is just and honorable.
That was then. Now there is a different kind of hated conflict going on right on the streets of America. The armed officers are not the National Guard. They are members of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, commonly known as ICE. The victims being targeted by bullets are not young college students but ordinary citizens such as Renee Good, a wife and a mother, and Alexander Pretti, an ICU nurse. Both individuals ended up DEAD in on-street confrontations with armed ICE officers in uniform.