May 4, 1970. 51 years. A life time? A memory? A veritable smudge on the American Canvas? It was the month I expected to walk across a raised platform and be handed my college diploma from the president of Marist College. But, a terrible thing happened on the way to an event that would mark my first step on the “real world” Yellow Brick Road.
The war in Viet Nam had been raging for what seemed like forever. Many students had either crossed the border to Canada to escape the draft or were drafted. Or…signed up for the National Guard. Or…for people like me, it was life as normal. The only problem…after the shooting and killing of four war protesters at Kent State by members of the Ohio National Guard, normal was turned upside down and inside out.
Marist, like hundreds of colleges across the country put up a “closed for business” sign. There were to be no final exams. Commencement hung in the balance. (In the end, Marist decided to hold a very solemn and subdued Commencement.)
What do I remember most about being on a ghost campus until Commencement exercises? I remember the “Wizard of Oz.” Literally remember it because I was part of a cast of the play rehearsing for a bus and truck tour of the Marist production that was to take us into the poverty belt of Appalachia in Kentucky.
Looking back, it was odd and ironic to be lost in Oz when the world was in mourning. Oz was about escaping from a grey world and finding what was over the rainbow. It was all about going to the Wizard to be awarded what we already had. It was realizing that there was “no place like home.”
If home was anything like the real home where innocent students could be killed, who would want to go home?
51 years after the Kent State shootings, the Yellow Brick Road is not paved with gold. Rather, it is paved with the result of our short-comings.
Is it possible that we left Emerald City without what we went there for? It doesn’t appear we are using our brains the way we should be; our ability to love is torn by so much hatred; and we seem to lack the courage to stand up and do what needs to be done.
We’ve got to do better.
Today’s blog is dedicated to Allison Beth Krause, 19, Jeffrey Glenn Miller, 20, and Sandra Lee Scheuer, 20, who died on the scene, at Kent State, and William Knox Schroeder, 19, was pronounced dead at Robinson Memorial Hospital in nearby Ravenna shortly afterward.
Along The Yellow Brick Road 